16 
LAND 6? WATER 
September 5, 1918 
The Theatre : By W. J. Turner 
The Royalty : TJje Title 
MR. AKx\01,r3 BENNETT is a wonderful man. 
He is a sort of genuine Bill Adams : a man 
who really would have won the battle of 
Waterloo — that is to say, he would have fired 
the cannon, led the bayonet charges, ridden 
at the head of the cavalry, harangued the troops, written a 
dispatch to the Times, and cooked the dinner after the battle. 
There was, however, a boastful extravagance about Bill 
Adams, the impostor, which is missing from his genuine 
successor, who segms to be becoming more and more matter 
of fact. Mr. Bennett once wrote marvellously good shockers ; 
I remember one was called The Sinews of War and another 
The Gates of Wrath. They were meant for train journeys, 
and were calculated to make you sweat at every pore and 
clutch the communication-cord if a fellow-traveller as much 
as moved on his scat. The Sinews of War, in particular, was 
an extraordinarily good yarn.' I have often meant to ask 
Mr. Bennett how much he made out of it, for if it was not 
much, I should give up all idea of ever writing sensational 
novels for money. But there was a vitality in those shockers 
that is absent from this comedy, which is indeed very dry. 
Not that The Title is actually dull — Mr. Bennett is .too 
good a journalist for that — but it is like a well-made piece 
of furniture produced without love or hate, and we retaliate 
by looking at it with indifference. A peculiar doom seems 
to await these extraordinarily efficient men and withers 
them up. 
Mr. Bennett has thought to himself: "The public needs 
to be enlightened on titles, and I am the man to do it." The 
result as a pamphlet is excellent ; as a play, it merely serves 
to keep one theatre in London from being occupied by some- 
thing worse. 
Titles are familiar to us all. As a boy, I remember, I was 
ambitious to become Sir Crowbar Smith. I recollect once 
at school, during a lesson on biblical history, writing out my 
full title— Sir Crowbar Smith, K.G., P.C, K.C.M.G., K.C.B., 
etc. — on a sheet of paper ; and a few days later, when pulling 
out that same paper, I found that some idiot had scrawled, 
as the last title of all, A.S.S. That gives practically the 
whole history of titles in a nutshell.' Men desire to be singled 
out from their fellows for honours ; but when the honours 
are applied externally to their names or persons they feel 
immediately foolish. Foolish because their merit has by 
this means become detached from them and attached to 
their decoration ; and they are now honoured by people 
incapable of telling whether they are rogues or good men. 
Strictly speaking, the^ are no longer men to be valued accord- 
ing to their worth, but bearers of labels to be valued as the 
colour of the label is green, yellow, blue, white, or whatever 
the shade may be. This aspect of titles has not been regarded 
by Mr. Bennett for the reason, perhaps, that it appeals only 
to honourable and remarkable men, who are thus not likely 
to appear very often in the honours lists. What Mr. Bennett 
is concerned with is the buying of titles, the notorious fact 
that titles are given abundantly to men whose only excuse 
is the possession, by any means that does not openly defy 
the law, of enormous sums of money. It would be very 
interesting to see a list of official prices for the various titles. 
It has frequently been stated in print that for a baronetage the 
sum required was about £30,000. This may seem a lot to 
pay for the privilege 6f calling yourself Sir Crowbar Smith, 
Bart. ; but if you examine it with a cold financial eye, it is 
really not a bad investment. It is a hereditary title, and it 
ensures safety from 'starvation and the workhouse for all 
your descendants to come. The future Sir Crowbar Sniith, 
Bart., might be penniless and a disgusting object ; but 
Society could not afford to let him starve or eat the Board 
of Cuardians' imitation turtle soup. It might not go so 
far as to provide real turtle soup for him — at least, not much 
of it — but it would disguise him to look as if he ate it. So, 
really, when one considers how, with wars and strikes, no 
investment is thoroughly safe, a man might well lay out 
his money to less advantage. I had hoped that Mr. Bennett 
would have given us a^^scene in which the millionaire con- 
tractor, introduced by various commission agents, finally 
unlocks the last door and completes the bargain. I was 
anxious to see exactly how it was done, and whether a large 
amount of tact was necessary, or whether the proceedings 
were blunt and to the point ; but Mr. Bennett has not 
enlightened us ; he is more interested in the general political 
pri(iciple than in the comic detail ; that is why he has not 
made the most of his subject. He shows us a family dis- 
cussing the forthcoming honours list. Mr. Culver and a 
friend of his daughter, a young man named Tranto, explain 
how the Government find it necessary to insert a good name 
or two to gild the pill ; so that the public, when reading 
down a list of people they have never heard of, will exclaim : 
" Oh, so and so ; he's a splendid fellow ; he deserves it ! " 
and will thus get the idea that the list is not so bad. The 
Government, Culver asserts, is always at its wit's end to 
find a few decent men to put in as, in the first place, they 
never come into contact with them, and, in the second place, 
these men nearly always refuse. He maintains that it is 
the duty of all honourable men absolutely to decline titles, 
and his daughter supports him. Though it is not known to 
anybody but Tranto, she is the famous Sampson Straight, 
author of powerful articles in Tranto's weekly paper attacking 
the Government. Culver's wife is led to express her agree- 
ment with her husband on the subject. Later on it transpires 
that Culver has been in this way preparing the ground, 
as the Government (in order to keep their list respectable) 
has offered him a title, and he is determined to refuse it. 
Unfortunately the news leaks out, and later in the evening 
Mrs. Culver rushes in ecstatic with delight to announce the 
good news. Culver reminds her of all they had been saying, 
but this appears to her as mere talk beside the solid prestige 
of being called Lady Culver. The rest of the play is the 
fight between husband and wife, in which the children join 
on the father's side. In the first round Mrs. Culver knocks 
her husband absolutely out ; he retires to bed to, figuratively, 
lick his wounds. Her success is partly gained by the assist- 
ance of his ixidispen sable lady secretary, who threatens to 
resign instantly if Mr. Culver declines the title, and inci- 
dently reveals that it has been her life-long ambition to be 
secretary to a baronet. In the next round the children 
come to Culver's rescue. His daughter threatens to leave 
home for good unless Mrs. Culver gives way. Mrs. Culver 
smiles, and says: "Very well, my dear, please yourself." 
Ignominious rout of the daughter I The boy-=-home from 
school — now joins in. Pie is a progressive lad, and says 
he is not going to have his democratic career ruined by a 
title ; he threatens to join the Royal Air Force at once, 
and become a scout pilot, instead of going into the artillery. 
Abject capitulation of Mrs. Culver ! Mr. Culver at once 
revives, and all is well ; when in rushes Tranto with the 
terrible news that as the Government -has heard that Culver 
was likely to refuse, they have in desperation decided, at the 
last moment, to insert in his place Sampson Straight. If 
the Government do this it is doomed ; it could never survive 
the ridicule of making a woman a baronet, thinking she was 
a man ; therefore. Culver must immediately accept. So 
Mrs. Culver becomes Lady Culver, after all. 
The scenes between husband and wife are extremely good, 
but the rest of the dialogue, is very poor ; and the love scenes 
between Tranto and Miss Culver are, frankly, terrible. Mr. 
Bennett ought to blush to have written them. Tranto keeps 
talking (like the ancient Shavian boy) of some great force 
which is pushing him ; he might as well talk about the great 
force which pushes him to eat ; this pseudo-philosophical 
stuff is tedious and out of date. The charming personality 
of Miss Eva Moore intervenes between us and Mr. Arnold 
Bennett's Mrs. Culver; otherwise .we should feel more 
annoyed with her. She is a silly sort of woman, and yet 
one's sympathies remain with her. The fact is Miss Moore 
made you feel as if it were not vanity but common sense that 
made Mrs. Culver. fight for the title; as if, in short, Mrs. 
Culver thought : " If the world is so stupid as to admire 
titles, let it admire us 1 " — which is thoroughly feminine and 
sane. It is eminently a subject for thick-headed German 
professors to write about after the war, and twenty fat 
volumes will probably leave Mrs. Culver's position pretty 
sound. What the critics of the present system rightly 
object to is that, while nobody looks upon a title as a certi- 
ficate of distinction, it is considered as a certificate of respect- 
ability ; and just as we do not expect an R.A. to be a great 
artist — in fact, we are ready to believe that no R.A. can be 
a great artist — yet we do expect that he should be able to 
draw ; so, while nobody expects to see any really great man 
figuring in the honours list, yet it is a shock — and a shock 
no Government should inflict upon its loyal citizens — to find 
among the men it has decided to make peers, baronets, or 
knights, tradesmen who would do j'ou down for sixpence. 
