SOMERSET MAUGHAM


VIRGINIA WOOLF


H. G. WELLS


HENRY JAMES


J. B. PRIESTLEY



REBECCA WEST


Arnold Bennett was indubitably great. I do not mean that he was a great writer, for about that, owing to the peculiar circumstances of his literary career, it is not easy to be sure. But as a character in a novel written by a great writer at his best was great, so was Arnold Bennett. He could not be compared properly with Fielding, or Dickens, or Balzac, but he could be compared with Squire Western, or Mr. Micawber, or Lucien de Rubempré. He was positive as they were, positive as the creations of mere nature rarely are.

Arnold Bennett wanted to do everything and to be everything. That determined his personal life and his literary career; and in that latter sphere it led to the curious result that he succeeded in being nearly everybody in turn. Incredible as it may seem, he successively occupied the positions in English literature which are roughly comparable to those in America occupied by—at their zenith—S. S. Van Dine, Sinclair Lewis, James Huneker, Theodore Dreiser and William Lyon Phelps. These analogues are not exact. The parallel between Arnold Bennett and Sinclair Lewis lies in nothing profound, but simply in the fact that both turned back from the metropolis and set themselves to a patient evaluation of provincial life, and gained great applause thereby. But the range of names does suggest the astonishing diversity of eminences between which he journeyed in his life-time. It is not less astonishing that in the spaces between his enjoyment of these eminences he was not eminent at all. He was as unequal as Wordsworth—a writer whom he resembled more closely than the hasty might suspect.

He had the first necessity for a novelist in his insatiable appetite for life. He loved every phenomenon which the world presented to him and grudged no expense of time and energy in studying it. Also he had the right emotional dynamo: what he saw he loved. The phenomena which the world was presenting to him at the moment when he began writing were those which composed life in the Five Towns: the amalgam of always patient and occasionally heroic and occasionally contemptibly supine endurance of routine and tedium, of staunchness and obstinacy, of preference for the uncolored stuff that lasts over the colored stuff which wears into holes, which is characteristic of English provincial life. He looked on this and saw that it was good. He saw, too, and here he was in advance of his age, that its physical setting was good: that the plumes of flame with which the factories brush the night sky, that snowdrops pushing their naive whiteness through the oily blackness of a sooty garden in front of a little house in a row, that the lights and shadows in a mean little room are as gloriously beautiful to the artist’s eye as the Parthenon against a blue sky.

This was nearly a revelation at this time. There are many reasons why Shaw and Wells and Galsworthy and Bennett should be honored; but chief among them is the difference between the state of English literature when they started to write and its state today. The English novel of the ’90s was deplorably frivolous. The outstanding personality in English fiction since the passing of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot was Robert Louis Stevenson; and it was his personal tragedy that he was under the thrall of an imaginary commitment to the graceful and discreet and limited.