The age was hungry for more solid food. Thomas Hardy, discouraged by the outcry over Jude, had shut up shop as a novelist. George Moore was working away, but he was so great that there was always bound to be a slight uneasiness between him and his generation. His way was not theirs; he was teaching them a new way. They were bound to feel a certain shyness, suspicion, resentment, envy. Henry James was doing superb work, but all the same he was (being essentially timid) subscribing to the heresy of the age and was not honestly with those who wanted sounder doctrine. The so-called esthetic movement of the ’90s had promised much, but it had vanished, partly on account of trouble with the police, but largely because it knew too little about esthetics. Its literature was noisy but empty of content like a drum. It was no wonder that the one writer who insisted on being earnest, George Gissing, received a homage from the young which is well nigh incredible in view of the drab incompetence of his writing. The situation was deplorable.

Then there came Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. And Bennett’s was in a sense the most easing advent. The other three came to give good writing which, however, they entangled in the nexus of modern and anti-capitalist thought. But Bennett stood for a purer liberation. He stood for the emancipation of the phenomenon, for the establishment of democracy among the perceptions. A novel need not depict nice people, it need not inculcate an established system of morality, it need not be loyal to any standard of delicacy. Simply it must celebrate life. He piled up book after book of sober, unevasive studies of provincial existence, till the world took notice and saw that a barrier had been built up between it and the floods of romanticism that had threatened to wash it away. True that at first he had to attract their attention by writing thrillers of a new kind, as glossily efficient and abounding in gadgets as a modern bathroom. It is not sufficiently remembered that he invented the modern type of detective story that is half an adventure story. The business had been begun by Conan Doyle, who showed one Sherlock Holmes and Watson peering down on the tobacco ash;but not till The Grand Babylon Hotel did one have a detective story that showed the crime being committed, that gave the rapture of the flight as well as the chase. As always, Arnold Bennett had to have everything.

He wrote better and better. Whom God Hath Joined is possibly still the best novel ever written about divorce; there is a scene beside a canal, a prehensile woman being detached, which is a masterpiece. Leonora is a beautiful study of maturity. In their day both were not only good but daring. One did not write about divorce, for it was too full of sensuous possibilities; and for the opposite reason one did not write about a woman of forty. Financial ease came to him and he went to live in France, and in that country, where traditions grow thick-trunked and deep-rooted like old oaks, he found the reinforcement of the spirit that many find there. Then he traveled on to the point where he wrote The Old Wives’ Tale.

That was his highest point.