Opposite the title-page of Mr. Arnold Bennett's latest tale will be found printed a list of its author's various works. It runs to an imposing length, and evidences a career of uncommon industry. Mr. Bennett is still only forty-three years of age, and had turned thirty before he published his first book. Yet he has already to his name a dozen novels, seven fantasies, so called, two sets of short stories, eight volumes labelled "belles lettres," and a couple of stage-plays, besides a collection of "polite farces." If to these we add two romances, as they are described, in the composition of which Mr. Eden Phillpotts assisted, Mr. Bennett's output amounts altogether to some thirty-four volumes. The impression of strenuous labor such statistics produce on the mind is intensified when we remember that all through his years of authorship the novelist of the Five Towns has been actively employed in journalism, performing for five years the duties of a dramatic critic, and writing even now a weekly literary causerie, and also when we reflect that the more ambitious examples of Mr. Bennett's art happen to be among the longest of modern novels. In the appreciation of this indefatigable craftsman which follows I shall not attempt to cover all the books to which he has put his signature, but shall content myself with selecting for mention representative specimens of his work in its different modes. If any justification were needed for this policy, it is supplied by the fact that not a few of Mr. Bennett's writings may be classed as journalistic writings. Some of his essays, for instance, offer information or criticism on matters of but momentary significance. Again, there are stories

were obviously produced more to please the public than the novelist himself; I think we may rightly call that sort of fiction journalistic. It is good journalism, of course, for Mr. Bennett is never less than thorough in anything he attacks; but it may be left out of account in any consideration of him as a serious artist. His claim to be in the front rank of our younger novelists depends on a relatively small group of books in which, with a minuteness of detail that is curiously insistent, with a realism that is as meticulous as it is convincing, he has reconstructed for us the town life and types of the Potteries under the Victorian era. "Anna of the Five Towns," "The Old Wives' Tale," "Clayhanger"-these and one or two others are the foundations on which his fame rests, solid and se

cure.

It is characteristic of Mr. Bennett's self-confidence that he should have set himself deliberately to explain in a book "How to Become an Author" (very sound and serviceable advice he gives), and it is no less characteristic of him that he should urge the novice to accommodate himself to, and compromise with, his readers. Certainly, if he was to square theory with his own practice, Mr. Bennett was bound to enter his protest against artistic intransigence. For, like Mr. Phillpotts and Mr. Wells at times, he has not scrupled to keep the pot boiling by such compromises, and yet has been able, like his comrades, to remain true to his ideals. His complacency, to be sure, did not lack cunning. If he granted concessions to his patrons in early days, 'it was only to impose on them his own notions later on. Not all authors can afford to take such a risk. There are

1 "How to Become an Author." By Arnold Bennett. (Pearson.)

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men who must write in their own way, and cannot make any sacrifice to popular taste if they are to retain their consciences. There are others who adopt the course of providing the public with "what the public wants," only to discover eventually that their capacity for achieving any nobler aim has somehow disappeared. There lies the danger of being too indulgent to the moods of the "great beast"; doing the second best may impair a faculty for doing the best-the material may react on the artist. Mr. Bennett in his time has written plenty of "popular" fiction, but he could always switch off his Muse, at will, to the service of serious art. His first book struck the note of high endeavor. It may well have contained, I should think, some autobiographical material. Though it was called "The Man from the North," it was pretty plainly about a man from the Midlands, and described affectingly the loneliness of a provincial, friendless amid the millions of London. But the next novel was frankly sensational. In "The Grand Babylon Hotel" Mr. Bennett beat the mystery-mongers on their own ground. And yet just about the same time he must have been at work on the first of his splendidly vital studies of the Five Towns. How has he contrived to keep the two sides of his fiction so long in tandem? Partly, I conceive, through his exceptional will-power. The most methodic of writers, he has trained himself, when at his desk, to act like a machine. Partly through his never permitting himself the least relaxation of style. You will not light upon a single slovenly phrase in "The Grand Babylon Hotel"; its language is as carefully wrought as that of "Clayhanger." Moreover, Mr. Bennett has

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"The Man from the North." By Arnold Bennett. 68. (John Lane.)

3 "The Grand Babylon Hotel." By Arnold Bennett. 6s. (Chatto & Windus.)

"Anna of the Five Towns." By Arnold Bennett. 68. Chatto & Windus.)

the knack in his sensational novels of getting hold of spacious ideas. Thus, à propos of the Babylon he makes his readers realize the huge population housed in a fashionable West End hotel; he shows them the finesse needed to manage such a concern; he forces them to apprehend imaginatively how isolated is the individual guest in such a place. So in "Buried Alive" it is no ordinary man who, according to him, lets himself be supposed to be dead, but a world-renowned painter, whose imposture sets all sorts of incalculable events in motion. Even on this class of fiction Mr. Bennett leaves his special mark.

But there is a world of difference between the stories of the Five Towns and the other Arnold Bennett novels. It is just the same sort of difference as divides Trollope's Barset Chronicles from his other books, only that it is more considerable. Indeed, we might trace rather marked resemblances between Anthony Trollope and the author of "Clayhanger" in certain respects, notably in their methods of work, the regularity of their writing habits, their readiness to turn out thousands of words in a day. Trollope, however, did nearly equal his Barchester stories in later works; Mr. Bennett is not the same man away from the Potteries. They give quality to his novels-depth and certainty of effect, roundness of characterization, color and vivacity, along with a hardly definable intimacy of touch. I have heard that a wit once remarked that he believed Paris was one of Mr. Bennett's Five Towns, and I acknowledge that the Paris chapters in "The Old Wives' Tale" are picturesquely done-the execution scene and the descriptions of the siege in particular. But I must own, for myself, that in reading the book I was glad to be taken back to Staffordshire, and felt as if Mr. Bennett gained renewed strength, like Antæus, as soon as he

touched his mother earth.

How much the novelist owes to the county of his birth I doubt if even he fully grasps. Happy are those authors whose lot it has been to be be born in the maligned provinces! There, at any rate in the Victorian days, changes came but slowly, old customs and old faiths survived, eccentrics and "characters" abounded, the patriarchal rule and domestic discipline still existed, dialect was spoken, local pride and local conservatism were rampant, old institutions, many of them abominable, such as the industrial slavery of children, had not been abolished. The superficial distinctions between men and men were scored more deeply then than now, there was less uniformity, we fondly believe at least, in type, and with more squalor and harshness were perhaps more sturdy virtues. The novelist who was brought up in such a corner of England, and could either watch or learn from others about the narrow life of his own or his father's times, had an enviable opportunity. For it is the things unconsciously seen and heard in childhood which leave the most lasting impressions on a sensitive mind. Mr. Arnold Bennett's mind must have been sensitive, and his memory retentive, with the result that he can call up for us pictures of the daily life of the Potteries in his youth and in his parents' time which give the idea of being extraordinarily vivid and actual. With no other material is he ever likely to produce the same effects, for here he is drawing on records not deliberately collected with an eye to "copy," but carelessly accumulated in the most receptive period of existence. Mr. Bennett is indebted to Staffordshire for more than the subject-matter of his novels; from its stock he derives the tenacity and selfreliance and sanity of outlook which are revealed in his writings, as well as a rather odd vein of humor. But for

his readers the main recommendation of his Midland origins is that he is able thereby to afford them a fresh view of life and human nature, to exhibit these in an unfamiliar setting, and, by a magic of his own, to make what to the average observer would have seemed commonplace and drab profoundly interesting and full of variety.

To analyze Mr. Bennett's technique is by no means easy. It is a matter of the multiplication of detail, and seems to betray the influence of Russian models. With stroke added to stroke the author proceeds till he has brought up before our eyes, first his leading figure or figures, next the family and shop or factory, then the street and neighborhood and local society. But all the time you are looking at the microcosm thus gradually developed through the medium of one or more temperaments. Mr. Bennett will not be hurried over his detail. He insists on displaying every stage of the process that leads to a resolve or a clash of wills. His characters are sometimes a piteously long time dying-old Clayhanger, for example. In such a case as this the novelist is prepared to trace the development of physical or mental decay with an emphasis on pathological symptoms that causes the reader, no less than the invalid's son, Edwin, many a shudder. It would be absurd to style Mr. Bennett's method photographic, yet it deals with innumerable small things. I am not sure that half its success does not depend on the author's leaving nothing out. He is singularly precise and microscopic in his observation. He cannot take you for a chance call into a jeweller's shop, which you will never see again, without giving you an inventory of what is contained in the counter and glass cases. That is an extreme instance, but is tell-tale. In his account of how it is possible to become an au

thor, Mr. Bennett is strong in his denunciation of the episode, yet in "Clay. hanger" he himself supplies a glaring illustration of what he has condemned. The whole section which describes with such pathos and flashlight intensity the experiences the elder Clayhanger had passed through as a child forced to work from daybreak in an underground factory, is wholly episodic, and Punch made great fun not so long ago, with this chapter as its text, over what it suggested was Mr. Bennett's habit of parenthesis. Yet no reader with any sense of beauty or pity would wish this retrospective section away, the more so as it throws a valuable and, indeed, much-needed light on the relations of father and son, and the jealousy the old man feels as he compares the joylessness of his youth with the comforts and education Edwin has enjoyed. And that is a good sample of the difficulties which beset the critic who tries to pick holes in Mr. Bennett's technique. It is obvious, he may say, that "Clayhanger" ought to be half as short as it is, and that "The Old Wives' Tale" could do with compression. He may urge, and quite rightly, that the novelist should be more selective, and use the blue pencil more resolutely on his work. Mr. Bennett's art would be all the better if he could in these two cases have kept only the strictly representative scenes, and discarded much to which he has devoted loving labor. I am afraid it is true that he leaves his scaffolding on view without any sense of shame. But is it much use quarrelling with a novelist's method when it is so deliberately adopted as is Mr. Bennett's, and when it is so suceessful? For when all is said, this author manages somehow to secure what he aims at-the suggestion of realism-as well as much besides-thus an individual interpretation of life, and

5 "Clayhanger." By Arnold Bennett. 6s. (Methuen.)

at any rate his detail is always made interesting and contributory to the general scheme. Y

When we come to examine the result produced by this mass of detail, there can be little doubt, it seems to me, about that. Emphatic as is Mr. Bennett the critic on a story being the first requisite of fiction, it is life itself, rather than a story, which he presents to us as a novelist in his best work. The pageant of life, from its early promise to its eclipse in decline and death-that is his subject, and surely it is big enough. Because the subject is so admirably covered in "The Old Wives' Tale," because the novel becomes an epic, as it were, of true, as distinct from sham realism, of Balzac's and Maupassant's, as distinct from Zola's realism, I regard the story of the Baines' sisters, who met with such different destinies, as far and away the completest and most striking thing Mr. Bennett has done. "Clayhanger," clear cut as is its battle between the old and the young, suffers from being but the first part of a trilogy, and from possessing a heroine whose personality is in the clouds and whose marriage to a man other than the one she loves is a mystery "to be explained in our next." "The Old Wives' Tale" labors under no such disadvantages. the range of a single novel we watch the progress of two girls from the age of fifteen till they sink into their graves. All the routine of the household and the shop, saddled with an invalid proprietor, is brought out as the tale gathers momentum. A typical section of the shop-keeping life of the Five Towns is spread out before our gaze. Then we are asked to watch the careers of the sisters. The one, hot-blooded and adventurous, ruins her chances by eloping with a contemptible sensualist, and has to pay for her folly

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"The Old Wives' Tale." By Arnold Bennett. 28. net. (Hodder & Stoughton.)

by spending all her best years in running a boarding establishment under the Second Empire, and slowly amassing money enough to justify her in returning home. The other girl marries a worthy tradesman, becomes a widow and the mother of a not too affectionate but mildly talented son, and drifts into a groove. The sisters join company, make allowances, but get rather badly on each others' nerves, and it is a relief to the gentle Constance when Sophia, who tries hard to make her move out of her stuffy house, dies with a rather tragic suddenness. There you have one of Mr. Bennett's most urgent morals-the difference between the spring and the winter of life. Sophia is so full of vitality in her youth, Constance so sweet and goodnatured; at the end both have become fussy old women who are fluttered and rendered miserable by the moods of a maid-servant. Disillusionment is the key-note of the novels; the revolt of youth against age furnishes their drama.

Conceive the young rebelling against the tyranny of their elders, and then picture youth becoming old in its turn and bewildered before the assault of the next generation, and you have the secret of the irony of Mr. Bennett's fiction. He is always producing that effect, and time cannot stale its pertinency. The piquancy of it is accentuated if the novelist can contrive, as Mr. Bennett can contrive, to hint at the costumes, the fashions, the politics, the literary interests of each particular .decade. He makes no mistake on these points, and so we obtain from him a history of the Midlands under the Victorian reign which is as exact and pungent as Mr. Wells's description of the southern suburbs of London in the same era provided in "The New Machiavelli."

Still, Mr. Bennett can write of the Potteries in lighter vein (the mere fact of that makes me hope he will

reconsider his resolution of ceasing to Ideal with them on the conclusion of the Clayhanger trilogy). He does not always look at life from the standpoint of the grave. He can see and share in "The Grim Smile of the Five Towns." In one of the short stories to which he gives that title he refers rather selfconsciously to a particular class of joke which appeals to his fellow-countrymen of the Midlands, and wonders whether it will carry with a larger audience. It concerns a quixote who, in consequence of a youthful misadventure, found himself saddled with the maintenance of his half-brother, and was anticipated in love and other ways by a cub who never raised a finger to earn his own living. This struck the inhabitants of the Potteries as funny. Mr. Bennett professed a doubt as to whether Londoners would see matters in the same light. He has grown more courageous, for in his latest novel, "The Card," which is an uproarious farce, he has perpetrated a joke which is of the genuine Staffordshire pattern. "Cards" are eccentric but successful persons on whose actions it is never possible to count. Derry Machin was a "card" of that sort. He was an adventurer who somehow or other knew by instinct when to take the bold course. A laundress's son, he won a scholarship at the local endowed school by cheating, and he was never too scrupulous in after years. He took certain rent-collecting out of his employer's hands. He advanced loans to slum-tenants. exploited a lifeboat at Llandudno. He started a thrift club in his native town, which had perilous adventures, but eventually brought him safe returns. He introduced himself to a local countess, and won her favor by a carefully arranged chapter of acci

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He

7 "The Grim Smile of Five Towns." By Arnold Bennett. 6s. (Chapman & Hall.)

8 "The Card." By Arnold Bennett. 68. (Methuen.)