FICTION; ARNOLD BENNETT AT LAST.*
IT was the engaging habit of Edward Henry Machin, other- wise'Denry the Card, to make up his mind, when things were at their worst, "to teach 'em a thing or two." Mr. Bennett apparently made up his mind to teach us a thing or two, and he has succeeded. Weary of novels that were as smart as new paint but might have been written by one of the waiters of the Grand Babylon Hotel, 'bored or exasperated by pocket philosophies that gave us the commercial correspondence- school view of life, we have thought of Mr. Bennett as a writer whose best work was over and done with long ago ; we have openly talked as if he were a spent force in contemporary letters. We withdraw unreservedly. Riceyman Steps, this new novel of his, is the peer of The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger, and if it has not the panoramic sweep of the earlier stories, it is even better constructed. We have often seen references to Mr. Bennett's "deadening objectivity" ; but here, while there is still the objectivity (for the author has not changed his naturalistic methods), only a person who really wanted confectionery instead of literature would discover anything deadening.
The scene is laid in the dismal region of Clerkenwell, and all the action passes there, with the exception of a brief honey- moon trip to a teashop in Oxford Street and Madame Tussaud's. Needless to say the sights, sounds and smells of Clerkenwell are touched in with a master hand. The characters are few and the story itself quite simple. A middle-aged second-hand bookseller, Earlforward by name, falls in love, in his own fashion, with a widow who keeps a shop across the way. The two get married and take into their house, as maid, a girl named Elsie who has acted as charwoman for them. Elsie is a war-widow who has a lover in the person of Joe, a shell-shocked ex-soldier. Owing to insufficient nourishment (Mr. Bennett talks of cancer, which seems unlikely), both Earlforward and his wife are taken ill ; she is removed to a hospital and dies there after an operation ; he remains at home, refusing medical attention, under the care of Elsie. The latter, a bewildered, unsophisticated creature, whose fine instinctive actions are magnificently described, has also her lover, Joe, suffering from malaria, upon her hands. In the end, Earlforward himself dies ; Joe recovers, and he and Elsie go into the service of the local practitioner, Dr. Haste. These arc the facts. The further facts are that Earlforward is a miser ; his wife only one degree better ; Elsie steals scraps of food ; Joe is little more than an idiot. Here, it is obvious, there is a glorious opportunity for that deadening objectivity. And yet there is none.
Mr. Bennett, with infinite cunning, while seeming to show us Clerkenwell and introduce to us, rather casually, a few people who live there, while appearing to add one remembered fact to another in the easiest fashion, is really allowing us to peep into the minds, the hearts, the souls of his principal figures. 'We know how it would all look from the outside, how it would read in, say, a newspaper report, and, thanks to our author's command of the method he has made his own, we do seem to be looking at it from the outside ; and yet we arc inside the characters, we are living with them in every moment, and we are compelled -to sympathize with them, and what seems of awful significance to them assumes a like significance for us, so that it is only when our author looses his hold that this is Clerkenwell as we think we know it, that these are misers as we have heard them commonly described, and so on and so forth. This is the great triumph 'of the book. We doubt if Mr. Bennett even remembers the passage (for, ironically enough, we may be certain that he long ago decided that Stevenson was beneath his notice), but there is one part of Stevenson's delightful essay on the romantic attitude to life, "The Lantern-Bearers," in which, defending his thesis that there is a poet in the centre of every man's mind, he singles out the unpleasant figure of Dancer, the miser, and shows what might be made -even of him if one worked from the centre outwards. Mr. Bennett has actually done this with Earlforward, who should be detestable, with all his ghastly economies, but whom we actually like, in spite of the • Riceyman Steps. By Arnold Bennett, Cassell, [78, Od.]
fact that there is not a single sentimental flourish in Mr. Bennett's description of him and his actions. His wife is a silly, mean, little creature, but she is also a woman, moving doubtfully between Clerkenwell and Eternity, and we follow her breathlessly, glad when she is glad (perhaps because she has won a battle over the lighting of a fire or a piece of cheese) and miserable when she is miserable. Even better than the Earlforwards is the figure that seems to us the corner-stone of the whole erection, the figure of Elsie, with her appetite and paltry thefts, her huge loyalties and unspoken passions, her little ill-spelt letter from her lover which she carries about until it is coming to pieces, her terrible last weeks in the house, when her master is lying ill on one floor, her lover (unknown to her master) lying ill on another floor, her mistress dying in hospital, when she is called upon to endure a kind of awful siege and is raised into a heroic figure, as simple human creatures so often are, by the sudden pressure of circumstance. But it is in the actual conduct of the narrative, the actual scenes that are introduced so easily and naturally before our eyes, without any appearance of undue haste, and yet with every little piece of description or dialogue adding precisely its quota to the general picture, that Mr. Bennett's genius is to be discovered ; and such scenes must be left to the reader himself, for they cannot be adequately epitomized.
The story is not, of course, entirely without flaws. Thus, for example, Mr. Bennett's account of Earlforward in the opening chapters does not altogether square with the later description of his actions and with our later idea of him, and it looks as if he were just a little too eager to obtain our sympathy before showing us the whole Earlforward. Again, the casual mention towards the end of the book of the fact that Elsie is a war-widow on a full pension seems very belated ; it hardly appears possible that such a fact would have escaped the Earlforwards, with their nose for money. But these are trifles when compared with the massive achievement of the book, which makes most of our recent triumphs in fiction seem rather paltry affairs. Mr. Bennett, by denying himself every romantic aid, by frankly accepting the ugly and common- place and transfiguring it, has justified his method even to those who have always disliked the method ; and he has triumphed over his critics in. the only way that such critics, if they are devoted to their profession, will be glad to recognize ; he has at last written a book that does not shake our faith in his genius but makes us passionately and delightedly reaffirm it.
J. B. PRIESTLEY.
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