Part 11

Within his own little world--so even the devil’s advocate would have to end by admitting--Mr. Beerbohm is a master. He has done a small thing perfectly, and one perfect quip will outlive ten bad epics. It is not to be wondered at that people already see the first hint of wings sprouting from his supremely well-tailored shoulders. He is, indeed, as immortal as anybody alive. He will flit through eternity, not as an archangel, perhaps, but as a mischievous cherub in a silk hat. He is cherub enough already always to be on the side of the angels. Those who declared that he had a heart were not mistaken. There is at least one note of tenderness in the peal of his mockery. There is a spirit of courtesy and considerateness in his writing, noticeable alike in “No. 2, The Pines,” and in the essay on servants. Thus, though he writes mainly on the arts and artists, he sees in them, not mere figures of ornament, but figures of life, and expresses through them clearly enough--I was going to say his attitude to life. He is no parasite at the table of the arts, indeed, but a guest with perfect manners, at once shy and brilliant, one who never echoes an opinion dully, but is always amusingly himself. That accounts for his charm. Perfect manners in literature are rare nowadays. Many authors are either pretending or condescending, either malicious or suspicious. “Max” has all the virtues of egotism without any of its vices.

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”:

I like Denmark because there some of the barbers’ shops have a thin ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin, which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and Italy.

He knows about it all: he knows; he knows. And, knowing so much, he is in all the better position to censure a certain British barber who parted his hair on the wrong side:

When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side--sure sign of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice the disposition of a customer’s hair before touching it. He was incapable, but not a bad sort.

And Mr. Bennett, even though he is perilously near being a teetotaller, can discourse to you as learnedly on drinks as on ways of getting your hair cut. “Not many men,” he says, “can talk intelligently about drink, but far more can talk intelligently about drink than about food.” He himself is one of the number, as witness:

There was only one wine at that dinner, Bollinger, 1911, a wine that will soon be extinct. It was perfect, as perfect as the cigars.... We decided that no champagne could beat it, even if any could equal it, and I once again abandoned the belief, put into me by certain experts, that the finest 1911 champagnes were Krug and Duc de Montebello.

One of the especial charms of Mr. Bennett as a writer is that he talks about painters and barbers, about champagne and short stories, in exactly the same tone and with the same seriousness, and measures them, so far as one can see, by the same standard. Indeed, he discusses epic poetry in terms of food.

All great epics are full of meat and are juicy side-dishes, if only people will refrain from taking them as seriously as porridge. _Paradise Lost_ is a whole picnic menu, and its fragments make first-rate light reading.

To write like this is to give effect of paradox, even when one is talking common sense. It is clear that Mr. Bennett does it deliberately. He does it as an efficient artist, not as a bungler. He fishes for our interest with a conscious _gaucherie_ of phrase, as when he ends his reference to the novels of Henry James with the sentence: “They lack ecstasy, guts.”

One of the most amusing passages in the book is that in which Mr. Bennett leaves us with a portrait of himself as artist in contrast to Henry James, the writer of “pot-boilers.” It hardly needs saying that in doing this Mr. Bennett is making no extravagant claims for himself, but is merely getting in a cunning retort to some of his “highbrow” critics. The comparison between his own case and that of James refers only to one point, and arises from the fact that James wrote plays with the sole object of making money. On this Mr. Bennett comments:

Somebody of realistic temperament ought to have advised James that to write plays with the sole object of making money is a hopeless enterprise. I tried it myself for several years, at the end of which I abandoned the stage for ever. I should not have returned to it, had not Lee Mathews of the Stage Society persuaded me to write a play in the same spirit as I was writing novels. It was entirely due to him that I wrote _Cupid and Commonsense_. Since then I have never written a play except for my own artistic satisfaction.

Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the arts in _Things that Have Interested Me_ for any other reason than that it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits--a man shy and omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns.

III

MR. CONRAD AT HOME

Mr. Conrad is nothing of a peacock. You may stare at him as long as you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous vanities. He is more like some bird that takes on the protective colouring of the earth and delights in avoiding rather than in attracting the prying eye. Flatter him as you will; call him a phœnix or a bird of paradise: he may be secretly pleased but he will only croak gruffly in reply, “To have the gift of words is no such great matter.” He does not know how to play up to our inquisitive admiration. We may think, as when we take up _A Personal Record_, that now at last we have caught him in a position in which he is bound to show us his fine feathers. But it is a vain hope. Glimpses we get--amazing glimpses--but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire. He protests that he is no cynic, but is he sure that he does not find a cynical amusement in tantalising our curiosity? Otherwise, would he have written in the preface to _Notes on Life and Letters_ that “perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying-up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy, but for other reasons that cannot be helped”? It may be that Mr. Conrad can suggest more enticing mysteries by a portrait of a piece of an author’s back than other writers can by a full-length representation, showing the polish on the boots and the crease in the trousers. In art the half (or very much less) is greater than the whole. Still, Mr. Conrad’s principal object in showing us the back is that it may leave us unsatisfied and speculating. He does not intend to satisfy us. It is as though he had written on the title-page of his autobiography: “Thus far and no further.”

At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics, realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust. “No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg. Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His first demand of an author is truth--not absolute truth, but the truth that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father.”

Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and Schopenhauer:

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary forms--poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay--as to which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form. Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the exaggerations of the poets.

If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival, not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read:

That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.

One would have to think hard in order to fit _Tristram Shandy_ and _The Pickwick Papers_ into this--if the word is not forbidden--formula. Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist “many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.” “To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of _Youth_ and _Typhoon_. And the image of the same author may be seen in the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”--the novelist--“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called “stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but his ideal self when he tells us:

His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world, discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events.

That, no doubt, is how Mr. Conrad learned the art of writing, and we may read autobiography into his praise of Maupassant again when he says: “He stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to the miserable vanity of a catchy phrase.” But his appreciation of Maupassant, though admirable in so far as it defines certain qualities in his own and Maupassant’s work, is worded in a manner that savours of intolerance of the work of many other good writers, from Shakespeare to Dickens and, if one may include a more Lilliputian artist, Stevenson. Thus he observes:

He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering cortège of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of the Thebaïde.

Maupassant’s austerity may have been an excellent thing for Maupassant, but to write like this is surely to reduce austerity to the level of a formula. That “splendid pageant of faults” may well be the salvation of another writer. We may admit that they remain faults unless they fit in as organic parts of a writer’s work. But Maupassant was a smaller, not a greater, writer in so far as he was unable so to fit them in.