THE IMMATURITY OF MR. BENNETT.* LILIAN, " a beautiful young

girl, created for pleasure and affection and expensive flattery " (surely a horrible fate for

anybody), was a typist, though not a contented typist. She yearned after a high, impossible ideal, which involved all the more vulgar luxuries so easily obtainable in exchange for cash.

The typewriting office at which she was employed had been started by Felix Grig, a middle-aged man of means, as a hobby for his spinster sister. Miss Grig suspected that Felix was more interested in Lilian than he ought to be ; therefore, she gave Lilian the sack. But this ruse was unsuccessful, for Felix invited Lilian to dine at the expensive restaurant of her dreams and suggested a little trip to the Continent. Lilian accepted with alacrity and off they went. Thereafter, chapters celebrating the delights of prosperous indolence on the Riviera. Unhappily, after a few days—or was it a few months ?—of this delicious existence Felix catches a cold and Lilian discovers that she is going to have a baby. Felix's cold becomes pneu- monia ; but pneumonia or not, he gets up, marries Lilian, makes a will leaving her everything, and dies. Lilian, having assisted at the usual ceremonies, returns to England and lives happily or unhappily ever afterwards in Felix's town house.

As the present reviewer, having finished the novel, sat by his fireside trying to identify the writer of Lilian with the writer of The Old Wives' Tale, there befel him an experience

once common in the East, now unusual anywhere. An empty beer-bottle stood—as empty beer-bottles will—at his elbow, and as the reviewer fixed it with an abstracted gaze there began to trail from its mouth a wisp of blue smoke which, before long, composed itself into an attenuated human figure not unlike the silhouette of the violinist Paganini. This was, of course, a Djinn, and, rising in the usual manner to terrific proportions, he spoke as follows :--- " What are you worrying about, Mr. X ? Do you not realize that the book is not by Arnold Bennett but by a certain Bennett Arnold ? "

Much surprised, the present reviewer glanced down at the

disagreeable dust-cover of the book and, sure enough, the author's name was Bennett Arnold. Greatly relieved, he took up his pen and wrote as follows :—Lilian, by Mr. Bennett

Arnold—a name unknown to us—is obviously a first novel, for it contains all the faults of youth. Mr. Arnold is still new to the spectacle of life and he is enthralled by the more super- ficial aspects of it. Expensive hotels and restaurants, casinos, trains-de-luxe and steam-yachts make him lyrical with delight. This is how Felix on the Riviera points out a yacht—a " glint- ing enormity " which " overpoweringly dominated the port " —to his lady-love :—

" That's the celebrated Qua. Crew of eighty odd. She came in last night for stores, and she's leaving again to-night, going to Naples. And here are the stores, you may depend.'

A lorry loaded with cases of wine drove up. ` But it's all like a fairy tale,' said Lilian.

Yes, it is. And so are you. You see, the point is that she's just about the finest of her kind. And so are you. She costs more than you to run, of course. A machine like that can't be run on less than a thousand pounds a week.' "

Such preoccupation with mere vulgar prosperity would, in an older man, be not only vulgar but also a most dangerous symptom. But Mr. Arnold is young : he will get over it and, as his mind matures, will turn his attention to more fundamental things. His youth peeps out in many other

• Lilian. By Arnold Bennett. London Cassell. Ida. =kJ places—in a certain facile worldliness, for instance, the assumption of the knowingness of the practised viveur, the sort of attitude which enables him to describe a woman thus :- "Although by general consent an authentic virgin, she had not the air of one. Rather full in figure, she was neither desiccated nor stiff, and when she moved her soft body took on flowing curves, so that clever and experienced observers could not resist the inference, almost certainly wrong, that in the historic past of

Isabel lay hidden some Sabine episode or sublime folly of self- surrender."

He is fond, too, of indulging in a smart and inappropriate humour, insufferable in anybody, but at least, in a very young man, a symptom that he does possess a humour which, when older, he may use to better purpose. In this vein he describes a stoppage in the Piccadilly Tube as being " due to an old, unhappy man who had wandered unobserved into the tunnel from Dover Street Station with the ambition to discover for himself what the next world was like. This ambition had been gratified."

The novel, then, is full of vulgarity, and again and again its effects are produced with a flashy precision which is both excessive and superficial. Where, then, is the merit of the book ? It lies in the writer's power of story-telling. The story is without complexity, a straightforward, simple narra- tive (the easiest form of novel to write) ; but Mr. Arnold has made it vivid and he has made it dramatic. The scenes and events live with a hard and rather brutal brilliance : the moments of tenderness are rare, but in a young writer one feels that with time the brilliance will soften and deepen and the tenderness will come to flower.

We advise novel-readers to avoid the books which Mr. Arnold writes during the next ten years and then to begin reading him. He will then, we believe, be worth the trouble, for he has still all his best years before him. Had he been a middle-aged man we should confidently have asserted that there was no hope for him. . . .

The reviewer laid down his pen with the sigh of one whose task is accomplished. His eye fell once more upon the dis- agreeable dust-cover of Lilian, and he was concerned to notice that the name upon it was not after all Bennett Arnold, but Arnold Bennett.