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Books and Persons by Arnold Bennett

A >> Arnold Bennett >> Books and Persons




An extract from an article in the _Fortnightly Review_.

An extract from "Man and Superman."

An article in favour of freedom of the Press reprinted from the Boston's
_Woman's Journal_.

An article by Lady Florence Dixie reprinted from a Scottish county paper.

* * * * *

On one occasion the editor of _Lucifer_ had occasion to mention that
adultery and fornication had not been criminal offences in England since
1660. The authorities were so aghast at the idea of this information being
allowed to creep out that they insisted on the passage being deleted. It
was.

* * * * *

Further. The Editor of an American paper, on it being suggested to him
that he should reprint portions of a criticism of "Measure for Measure,"
by Mr. A.B. Walkley in the _Times_, refused to do so for fear of
prosecution. Perhaps the most truly American instance of all is the
misfortune that befell the Reverend Mabel McCoy Irwin. The excellent lady
began to publish a paper advocating strict chastity for both sexes. It was
excluded from the mails on the ground that no allusion to sex could be
tolerated. I reckon this anecdote to be the most exquisitely perfect of
all anecdotes that I have ever come across in the diverting history of
moral censorships. There is a subtle flavour about that name, Mabel McCoy
Irwin, which is indescribably apposite ... McCoy. It is a wonderful world!
I am much indebted to an American correspondent for these delights.




BRIEUX


[_17 Feb. '10_]

I foresee a craze in this country for Brieux. I first perceived its coming
one day during an intellectual meal in a green-painted little restaurant
in Soho. Whenever I go into Soho I pass through experiences which send me
out again a wiser man. On this occasion I happened to speak lightly of
Brieux to a friend of mine, a prominent and influential member of the
Stage Society--one of those men in London who think to-day what London
will think to-morrow, and what Paris thought yesterday. He was visibly
shocked by my tone. His invincible politeness withstood the strain, but
the strain was terrible. From this incident alone I was almost ready to
prophesy a Brieux craze in London. And now a selection of Brieux's plays
is to be published in English in one volume, with a preface by Bernard
Shaw. Within a fortnight of the appearance of the book the Brieux craze
will exist in full magnificence. Leading articles will contain learned
off-hand allusions to Brieux, Brieux and Shaw will be compared and
differentiated, and Brieux will be the most serious dramatist in France. I
doubt not that Mr. Shaw's preface will be a witty and illuminating
affair, and that it will show me agreeable aspects of Brieux's talent
which have hitherto escaped me; but if it persuades me that Brieux is an
artistically serious dramatist worth twopence, then I will retire from
public life and seek a post as third sub-editor on the _British Weekly_.

* * * * *

Brieux is a man with moral ideas. I will admit even that he is dominated
by moral ideas, which, if they are sometimes crude, are certainly
righteous. He is a reformer and a passionate reformer. But a man can be a
passionate reformer, with a marked turn for eloquence, and yet not be a
serious dramatist. Dr. Clifford is a reformer; Mr. Henniker Heaton is a
passionate reformer; and both are capable of literature when they are
excited. But they are not dramatists. We still await Mr. Henniker Heaton's
tragic fourth act about the failure of the negotiations for a penny post
with France. Brieux is too violent a reformer ever to be a serious
dramatist. Violent reformers are unprincipled, and the reformer in Brieux
forces the dramatist in him to prostitution. The dramatist in him is not
strong enough to resist the odious demands of the reformer: which fact
alone shows how far he is from being a first-rate dramatist. As a
dramatist Brieux is no stronger, no more sincere, no less unscrupulous, no
less viciously sentimental, than the fashionable authors of the boulevard,
such as Capus, Donnay, and the ineffable Bernstein, so adored in London.
And it is as a dramatist that he must be judged. Of course, if you wish to
judge him as a reformer, you must get some expert opinion about his
subjects of reform. I fancy that you will end by discovering that as a
reformer he must be considered just a little crude.

* * * * *

I have seen most of Brieux's plays, and I have seen them produced under
his own direction, so that I can judge fairly well what he is after on the
stage. And I am bound to say that, with the exception of "Les Trois Filles
de Monsieur Dupont" (which pleased me pretty well so far as I comprehended
its dramatic intention), I have not seen one which I could refrain from
despising. Brieux's plays always begin so brilliantly, and they always end
so feebly, in such a wishwash of sentimentalism. Take his last play--no,
his last play was "La Foi," produced by Mr. Tree, and I have not yet met
even an ardent disciple of the craze who has had sufficient effrontery to
argue that it is a good play. Take his last play but one, "Suzette"--or
"Suzanne," or whatever its girl's name was--produced at the Paris
Vaudeville last autumn. The first act is very taking indeed. You can see
the situation of the ostracized wife coming along beautifully. The
preparation is charming, in the best boulevard manner. But when the
situation arrives and has to be dealt with--what a mess, what falseness,
what wrenching, what sickly smoothing, what ranting, and what terrific
tediousness! It is so easy to begin. It is so easy to think of a fine
idea. The next man you meet in an hotel bar will tell you a fine idea
after two whiskys--I mean a really fine idea. Only in art an idea doesn't
exist till it is worked _out_. Brieux never (with the possible exception
above mentioned) works an idea _out_. Because he can't. He doesn't know
enough of his business. He can only do the easy parts of his business.
Last autumn also, the Comedie Francaise revived "La Robe Rouge." The
casting, owing to an effort to make it too good, was very bad; and the
production was very bad, though Brieux himself superintended it. But, all
allowances made for the inevitable turpitudes of this ridiculous national
theatre, the was senile; it was done for! Certainly it exposes the abuses
of the French magistrature, but at what cost of fundamental truth! The
melodramatic close might have been written in the Isle of Man.

* * * * *

Take the most notorious of all his plays, "Les Avaries." It contains an
admirable sermon, a really effective sermon, animated by ideas which I
suppose have been in the minds of exceptionally intelligent men for a
hundred years or so, and which Brieux restated in terms of dramatic
eloquence. But the sentimentality of the end is simply base. The
sentimentality of another famous play, "Maternite," is even more
deplorable.

* * * * *

It is said that Brieux's plays make you think. Well, it depends who you
are. No, I will admit that they have several times made me think. I will
admit that, since I saw "Les Avaries," I have never thought quite the same
about syphilis as I did before. But what I say is that this has nothing to
do with Brieux's position as a dramatist. Brieux could have written a
pamphlet on the subject of "Les Avaries" which would have impressed me
just as much as his play (I happened to read the play before I witnessed
it). Indeed, if he had confined himself to a pamphlet I should have
respected him more than I do. Brieux has never sharpened my sense of
beauty; he has never made me see beauty where I had failed to see it. And
this is what he ought to have done, as a serious dramatist. He is
deficient in a feeling for beauty; he is deficient in emotion. But that is
not the worst of him. Mr. Shaw is deficient in these supreme qualities.
But Mr. Shaw is an honest playwright. And Brieux (speaking, of course, in
a sense strictly artistic) is not. That he is dishonest in the cause of
moral progress does not mitigate his crime. Zealots may deny this as
loudly as they please. Nothing can keep Brieux's plays alive; they are
bound to go precisely where the plays of Dumas _fils_ have gone, because
they are false to life. I do not expect to kill the oncoming craze, but I
will give it no quarter.




C.E. MONTAGUE


[_10 Mar. '10_]

I have read Mr. C.E. Montague's "A Hind Let Loose" (Methuen, 6s.), and I
am not going to advise any one to follow my example. I do not desire to
prejudice his circulation, but I have my conscience to consider. This is
not a book for the intelligent masses; it would be folly to recommend it
to them. It is for the secretly arrogant few, those who really do "know
that they are august" within, whatever garment of diffident and mild
modesty they may offer to the world. Only those few can understand it. All
admiration other than theirs will be either ignorant or dog-like--or both.
Everybody on the Press will say that "A Hind Let Loose" is a novel about
journalism. It is not. Journalism is merely the cloak hanging windily
about it, as her cloak hung about Mrs. Colum Fay. It is a novel about the
pride of the Ego. It is the fearful and yet haughty cry of originality
against the vast tendency of the age, which tendency is that people should
live in the age as in an intellectual barracks. Hedlum, the conversational
clubman and successful barrister, is the real villain of the story, though
he appears but for a moment, "Hedlum would take up all that was current,
trim it and pare its nails, and give it his blessing and send it out into
the world to get on, and it did famously. You felt that if it was not true
then the fault was truth's; there must be some upper order of truth, not
universally known, to which he had conformed and to which the facts, in
the vulgar sense, could not have been loyal. All of him helped the effect.
He was of the settled age--fifty or so--handsome, with the controlled
benignity, the mellowed precision, the happy, distinguished melancholy
sometimes united in a good-looking judge.... You watched the weighing of
each word at its exit from the shaved, working lips, and the closure of
their inexorable adamant behind its heels. As the last commonplace of club
gossip, smoke-room heroics, and music-hall sentiment issued from these
portals, transfigured by the moderate discount that made it twice itself,
you not only saw it was final truth, or virility's quintessential emotion;
you felt he had done something decisive, even gallant, and that you were
in it--a fine fellow, too, in your way; and you quickened; you lived back
and forward, back to the blithe days at school when they first taught you
never to think your own thoughts or take what came in a way of your own,
but to pool your brains with the rest and 'throw yourself into the life of
the school,' and on to your early manhood's deeper training in resemblance
to others, and so to the good day, always coming and always here, always
to be had by him who wills it with his might, when the imitative shall
inherit the earth."

* * * * *

I quote this, the very essence of the work, in order to choke off the
feeble, the kind, and the altruistic. I would not hawk this book. If I had
foreknown what it was I would never have mentioned it. I would have
mentioned it to none, sure that, by the strange force of gravity which
inevitably draws together a book and its fit reader, the novel would in
the end reach the only audience worthy of it. I say no more about it.




PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS


[_10 Mar. '10_]

Authentic documents are always precious to the student, and here is one
which strikes me as precious beyond the ordinary. It is a letter received
from a well-known publisher by a correspondent of mine who is a
journalist:

"I am awfully sorry that we cannot take your novel, which is immensely
clever, and which interested my partner more than anything he has read in
a good while. He agrees with me, however, that it has not got the
qualities that make for a sale, and you know that this is the great
desideratum with the publisher. Now don't get peevish, and send us nothing
else. I know you have a lot of talent, and your difficulty is in applying
this talent to really practical problems rather than to the more
attractive products of the imagination. Get down to facts, my son, and
study your market. Find out what the people like to read and then write a
story along those lines. This will bring you success, for you have a
talent for success. Above all things, don't follow the lead of our
headstrong friend who insists upon doing exactly what you have done in
this novel, namely, neglecting the practical market and working out the
fanciful dictates of imagination. Remember that novel-writing is as much
of a business as making calico. If you write the novels that people want,
you are going to sell them in bales. When you have made your name and your
market, _then_ you can afford to let your imagination run riot, and _then_
people will look at you admiringly, and say, 'I don't understand this
genius at all, but isn't he great?' Do you see the point? You must do this
AFTER you have won your market, not before, and you can only win your
market in the first place by writing what folks want to buy.--Sincerely
yours--"

* * * * *

The writer is American. But the attitude of the average pushing English
publisher could not have been more accurately expressed than in this
letter sent by one New Yorker to another. The only thing that puzzles me
is why the man originally chose books instead of calico. He would have
sold more bales and made more money in calico. He would have understood
calico better. In my opinion many publishers would have understood calico
better than books. There are two things which a publisher ought to know
about novel-producers--things which do not, curiously enough, apply to
calico-producers, and which few publishers have ever grasped. I have known
publishers go into the bankruptcy court and come out again safely and yet
never grasp the significance of those two things. The first is that it is
intensely stupid to ask a novelist to study the market with a view to
obtaining large circulations. If he does not write to please himself--if
his own taste does not naturally coincide with the taste of the
million--he will never reach the million by taking thought. The Hall
Caines, the Miss Corellis, and the Mrs. Humphry Wards are born, not made.
It may seem odd, even to a publisher, that they write as they do write--by
sheer glad instinct. But it is so. The second thing is that when a
novelist has made "his name and his market" by doing one kind of thing he
can't successfully go off at a tangent and do another kind of thing. To
make the largest possible amount of money out of an artist the only way is
to leave him alone. When will publishers grasp this? To make the largest
possible amount of money out of an imitative hack, the only way is to
leave him alone. When will publishers grasp that an imitative hack knows
by the grace of God forty times more about the public taste than a
publisher knows?




TOURGENIEV AND DOSTOIEVSKY


[_31 Mar. '10_]

I have read with very great interest Mr. Maurice Baring's new volume about
Russia, "Landmarks in Russian Literature" (Methuen, 6s. net). It deals
with Gogol, Tourgeniev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and Tchehkoff. It is
unpretentious. It is not "literary." I wish it had been more literary. Mr.
Baring seems to have a greater love for literature than an understanding
knowledge of it. He writes like a whole-hearted amateur, guided by common
sense and enthusiasm, but not by the delicate perceptions of an artist. He
often says things, or says things in a manner, which will assuredly annoy
the artist. Thus his curt, conventional remarks about Zola might have been
composed for a leading article in the _Morning Post_, instead of for a
volume of literary criticism. Nevertheless, I cannot be cross with him. In
some ways his book is illuminating. I mean that it has illuminated my
darkness. His chapters on Russian characteristics and on realism in
Russian literature are genuinely valuable. In particular he makes me see
that even French realism is an artificial and feeble growth compared with
the spontaneous, unconscious realism of the Russians. If you talked to
Russians about realism they probably would not know quite what you meant.
And when you had at length made them understand they would certainly
exclaim: "Well, of course! But why all this fuss about a simple matter?"
Only a man who knows Russia very well, and who has a genuine affection for
the Russian character, could have written these chapters. And I am ready
to admit that they are more useful than many miles of appreciation in the
delicate balancing manner of, say, an Arthur Symons.

* * * * *

Mr. Baring raises again the vexed question of Tourgeniev's position. It is
notorious that Tourgeniev is much more highly appreciated outside Russia
than in it. One is, of course, tempted to say that Russians cannot judge
their own authors, for there is a powerful and morally overwhelming cult
for Tourgeniev in France, Germany, and England. I have myself said, sworn,
and believed that "On the Eve" is the most perfect example of the novel
yet produced in any country. And I am not sure that I am yet prepared to
go back on myself. However, it is absurd to argue that Russians cannot
judge their own authors. The best judges of Russian authors must be
Russians. Think of the ridiculous misconceptions about English literature
by first-class foreign critics!... But I am convinced that Mr. Baring goes
too far in his statement of the Russian estimate of Tourgeniev. He says
that educated Russian opinion would no more think of comparing Tourgeniev
with Dostoievsky than educated English opinion would think of comparing
Charlotte Yonge with Charlotte Bronte. This is absurd. Whatever may be
Tourgeniev's general inferiority (and I do not admit it), he was a great
artist and a complete artist. And he was a realist. There is all earth and
heaven between the two Charlottes. One was an artist, the other was an
excellent Christian body who produced stories that have far less relation
to life than Frith's "Derby Day" has to the actual fact and poetry of
Epsom. If Mr. Baring had bracketed Tourgeniev with Charlotte Bronte and
Dostoievsky with the lonely Emily, I should have credited him with a
subtle originality.

About half of the book is given to a straightforward, detailed, homely
account of Dostoievsky, his character, genius, and works. It was very much
wanted in English. I thought I had read all the chief works of the five
great Russian novelists, but last year I came across one of Dostoievsky's,
"The Brothers Karamazov," of which I had not heard. It was a French
translation, in two thick volumes. I thought it contained some of the
greatest scenes that I had ever encountered in fiction, and I at once
classed it with Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme" and Dostoievsky's "Crime
and Punishment" as one of the supreme marvels of the world. Nevertheless,
certain aspects of it puzzled me. When I mentioned it to friends I was
told that I had gone daft about it, and that it was not a major work.
Happening to meet Mrs. Garnett, the never-to-be-sufficiently-thanked
translator of Tourgeniev and of Tolstoy, I made inquiries from her about
it, and she said: "It is his masterpiece." We were then separated by a
ruthless host, with my difficulties unsolved. I now learn from Mr. Baring
that the French translation is bad and incomplete, and that the original
work, vast as it is, is only a preliminary fragment of a truly enormous
novel which death prevented Dostoievsky from finishing. Death, this is yet
another proof of your astonishing clumsiness! The scene with the old monk
at the beginning of "The Brothers Karamazov" is in the very grandest
heroical manner. There is nothing in either English or French prose
literature to hold a candle to it. And really I do not exaggerate! There
is probably nothing in Russian literature to match it, outside
Dostoievsky. It ranks, in my mind, with the scene towards the beginning of
"Crime and Punishment," when in the inn the drunken father relates his
daughter's "shame." These pages are unique. They reach the highest and
most terrible pathos that the novelist's art has ever reached. And if an
author's reputation among people of taste depended solely on his success
with single scenes Dostoievsky would outrank all other novelists, if not
all poets. But it does not. Dostoievsky's works--all of them--have grave
faults. They have especially the grave fault of imperfection, that fault
which Tourgeniev and Flaubert avoided. They are tremendously unlevel,
badly constructed both in large outline and in detail. The fact is that
the difficulties under which he worked were too much for the artist in
him. Mr. Baring admits these faults, but he does not sufficiently dwell on
them. He glances at them and leaves them, with the result that the final
impression given by his essay is apt to be a false one. Nobody, perhaps,
ever understood and sympathized with human nature as Dostoievsky did.
Indubitably nobody ever with the help of God and good luck ever swooped so
high into tragic grandeur. But the man had fearful falls. He could not
trust his wings. He is an adorable, a magnificent, and a profoundly sad
figure in letters. He is anything you like. But he could not compass the
calm and exquisite soft beauty of "On the Eve" or "A House of
Gentlefolk."...




JOHN GALSWORTHY


[_14 July '10_]

Mr. John Galsworthy, whose volume of sketches, "A Motley," is now in
process of being reviewed, is just finishing another novel, which will no
doubt be published in the autumn. That novels have to be finished is the
great disadvantage of the novelist's career--otherwise, as every one
knows, a bed of roses, a velvet cushion, a hammock under a ripe pear-tree.
To begin a novel is delightful. To finish it is the devil. Not because, on
parting with his characters, the novelist's heart is torn by the grief
which Thackeray described so characteristically. (The novelist who has put
his back into a novel will be ready to kick the whole crowd of his
characters down the front-door steps.) But because the strain of keeping a
long book at the proper emotional level through page after page and
chapter after chapter is simply appalling, and as the end approaches
becomes almost intolerable. I have just finished a novel myself; my
nineteenth, I think. So I know the rudiments of the experience. For those
in peril on the sea, and for novelists finishing novels, prayers ought to
be offered up.

In accordance with my habit of re-reading books which have uncommonly
interested me on first perusal, I have recently read again "A Man of
Property." Well, it stands the test. It is certainly the most perfect of
Mr. Galsworthy's novels up to now. Except for the confused impression
caused by the too rapid presentation of all the numerous members of the
Forsyte family at the opening, it has practically no faults. In
construction it is unlike any other novel that I know, but that is not to
say it has no constructive design--as some critics have said. It is merely
to say that it is original. There are no weak parts in the book, no places
where the author has stopped to take his breath and wipe his brow. The
tension is never relaxed. This is one of the two qualities without which a
novel cannot be first class and great. The other is the quality of sound,
harmonious design. Both qualities are exceedingly rare, and I do not know
which is the rarer. In the actual material of the book, the finest quality
is its extraordinary passionate cruelty towards the oppressors as
distinguished from the oppressed. That oppressors should be treated with
less sympathy than oppressed is contrary to my own notion of the ethics of
creative art, but the result in Mr. Galsworthy's work is something very
pleasing. Since "A Man of Property," the idea that the creator of the
universe, or the Original Will, or whatever you like to call it or him,
made a grotesque fundamental mistake in the conception of our particular
planet, has apparently gained much ground in Mr. Galsworthy's mind. I hope
that this ground may slowly be recovered by the opposite idea. Anyhow, the
Forsyte is universal. We are all Forsytes, just as we are all Willoughby
Patternes, and this incontrovertible statement implies inevitably that Mr.
Galsworthy is a writer of the highest rank. I re-read "A Man of Property"
immediately after re-reading Dostoievsky's "Crime and Punishment," and
immediately before re-reading Bjoernson's "Arne." It ranks well with these
European masterpieces.




SUPPRESSIONS IN "DE PROFUNDIS"


[_21 July '10_]

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