July 5, 1917, 
LAND & WATER 
13 
Life and Letters 
By J. C. Squire 
Mr. Bennett 
as Critic 
THE literary " causerie " does not flourisli in this 
country. Its place is usually supplied by a column 
of what are usually called " literary notes," but 
which would be more accurately described as puli- 
lishers' announcements garnished witli comments which are 
supposed to make them readable but only succeed in making 
them silly. There is one gentleman who . . . but, no, 
the decencies should be observed. Now and then a good 
causerie crops up, flourishes for a few years, and disappears 
again. The best of our time was that which Mr. Arnold 
Bennett contributed from 1908 to 1911 to the New Age over 
the signature of Jacob Tonson. Portions of this are now 
reprinted in Books and Persons (Chatto andWindus, 5s. net). 
The immediately striking thing about Mr. Bennett's notes 
is their range. There is one large exception : he says very 
little about the dead, though he does allow himself a discursion 
on the greatness of Wordsworth. He is deliberate in this : 
as he remarks, there are good living authors who have to 
earn their living and can profit by publicity, whereas the 
corpses of the illustrious defunct can dispense with our 
solicitude. He gives us very little of tlife criticism which has 
been defined as " the adventures of the soul- jamong master- 
pieces": it is evident that that kind' of" '(S-ifticism- must 
depend almost entirely on the dead for its subject matter. 
Set elaborate ■.criticism, in fact he avoids ^s a rul^, even 
where the living are concerned. His job as a tritic he con- 
ceived to be that of a taster, an " authentic expert," with an 
intellect, a knowledge of human nature, and a trained literary 
sense who gave his opinions, very briefly, for what they were 
worth. He sang the praises of Joseph Conrad', Dostoevsky, 
and Tchekhoff years before their greatness was uiiiversally 
accepted in this country. And he strenuqusly eulogised, too, 
a good many other men, like Wilfrid Whitten, Murray Gil- 
' Christ and Leonard Merrick, about whom he may or may not 
have been right, but about whom he had formed judgments, 
which he could rationally defend, quite independently of 
other people's views. One is struck, in fact, by the multitude 
of the people he did praise : his natural liking for satire and 
the caustic phrase never made him less than generous to any 
contemporarj' who was the sHghtest use. Only, t think, in 
two instances did he give what many of us would think to be 
inadequate admiration to great modern writers. He declared — 
in each case with the. handsomest reservations— his inability 
to go the whole hog about G. K. Chesterton and Henry 
James. And with characteristic honesty, instead of trying 
to vamp up more convincing and damning objections, he gave 
the real reasons. Of Henry James (after fine discijipiinating 
praise) he says "What it all comes to is merely that his 
subject matter does not as a rule interest me " '; of Mr. 
Chesterton that 
in my opinion, at this time of day, it is absolutely impossible 
for a young man with a first-class intellectual apparatus to 
accept any form of dogma, and I am therefore forced to 
the conclusion that Mr. Chesterton has not got a first-class 
intellectual apparatus. ... I will go further and say 
that it is impossible, in one's private thoughts, to think of the 
accepte* of dogma as an intellectual equal. 
Tlie first sentence is rather unfortunately phrased : it reminds 
one of Mr. Bennett's denunciation, in another place, of people 
who will not admit " x " to be true because it would force 
conclusions they do not want to accept. And it may be 
pointed out, as to the second sentence, that this is precisely: 
what many accepters of dogma feel about the other side. 
But the point is that what Mr. Bennett thinks he says, and 
without beating about the bush. 
«♦•*,* 
-This causerie, however, was not knainly concerned with 
examining or advertising good writers: All literature was 
Mr. Bennett's field, and all facts relating' to the literary 
industry. He was interested in the rise and fall of reputa- 
tions, justified and unjustified : in the organisation of the 
publishing trade : in the remuneration of authors : in 
the various publics, the small public of " experts," the small 
])ublic with the habit of reading good stuff imitatively, the 
very large public of library-subscribers and the immense jndjlic 
which has not yet been reached and which buys nothing 
of value except vilely-bounded sets of Dickens and Scott 
that are hawked about by the touts. In this reprinted 
selection you are switched off from the audacities of Mrs. 
Elinor Glyn to the idiocies of provincial Library Committees, 
and from the profit Mr. John Murray got out of Queen 
Victoria's letters to the artistic badness of Brieux. Handled by 
a less vivacious and individual writer many of the controversies 
and incidents he deals with would have interested nobody 
but those in the trade when they were written and nobody at 
all now. But Mr.' Bennett has the gift of making anything 
interesting to anybody : the thing that matters most is the 
eye that sees and not the object seen. 
But the topical remains topical. The criticisms in one or 
two paragraphs are bound to be pemmicanized expressions 
of opinion. However sound, vigorously delivered, decorated 
with amusing quotations and anecdotes, they suffer from the 
absence of background that the conditions of their production 
necessitated : and when they deal with authors who no longer 
are even supposed to matter, and novels which were but the 
novels of the season; only Mr. Bennett's phraseology makes 
them readable. Even some of his Butts — and he is always 
good on his Butts — are now dead and gone : a new genera- 
tion of vermin has begun to crawl over the surface of literature, 
including Professors worse than any of those stamped on by 
both "Jacob Tonson's" feet. The best passages in Mr. Bennett's 
book, are those written, not by the weekly chronicler, but 
by the clear-eyed, imaginative and sympathetic novelist who 
observes the whole human show. There is a fine chapter 
on the Provincial Book Market which no journalist who was 
not also a " creative artist " could or would have written. 
It takes both observation and imagination, at this time of 
day, to see this aspect of the Free Library's operations, and 
to illustrate it so concretely : 
Go into the average good home of the crust, in the quietude 
of " after-tea," and you will see a yoHthful miss sitting over 
something by Charlotte M. Ypnge or Charles Kingsley. 
And that something is repulsively foul, greasjf, sticky, black. 
Kemember that it reaches from thirty to a hii'Wdfed such 
good homes every year. Can you wonder that it should carry 
deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt ? You 
cannot. But you are entitled to wonder why the Municipal 
Sanitary Inspector does not inspect it and order it to be 
destroyed. . . . That youthful miss in torpidity over 
that palimpsest of filth is what the Free Library has to show 
as the justification of its existence. 
"I know," adds Mr. Bennett, the journalist, "what I am talking 
about." The addition, after this description, was not necessary. 
There are very acute and illuminating surveys of the 
English prosperous classes and of the dilettanti : and here 
,and there a delightful little interpolated essay,, such is 
that on A Book in a Railway Accident. But about the finest 
thing in the book is the chapter on Swinburne : 
On Good Friday night I was out in the High Street, at the 
cross-roads, where the warp and the woof of the traffic assault 
each other under a great glare of lamps. The shops were 
closed and black, except where a tobacconist kept the 
tobacconist's bright and everlasting vigil ; but above the 
shops occasional rare windows were illuminated, giving hints 
— dressing tables, pictures, gas-globes — -of intimate private 
lives. I don't know why such hints should always seem to 
me pathetic, saddening ; but they do. And beneath them, 
through the dark depth of shutters, motor-omnibuses roared 
and swayed and curved, too big for the street and dwarfing 
it. And automobiles threaded them between, and bicycles 
dared the spaces that were left. From afar off there came 
a flying light, like a shot out of a gun, and it grew into a man 
])erched on a shuddering contrivance that might have been 
invented by H. G. Wells, and swept perilously into the con- 
tending currents, and by miracles emerged untouched, and 
. was gone, driven by the desire of the immortal soul within 
the man." This strange thing happened again and again. 
A few houses away, where the upper windows were lighted, 
the old poet was dying : but the crowd knew nothing of it. 
I should like to have quoted the whole passage. It may be 
remarked, in conclusion, that whenever Mr. Bennett is at his 
best his style automatically changes. I suspect that the 
method of "successive short sentences, like the discharges of a 
muted machine gun, is a method made on theory : when 
more commas, dashes and even semi-colons creep in, one 
feels that Mr. Bennett is speaking naturally to one and not 
shooting at one with his shrewd eye screwed up. 
