THE ART OF LITERARY ADVERTISEMENT

As Personified, for Instance, by Mr. Arnold Bennett

HENRY BRINSLEY

MR. BENNETT'S American publishers, with a very good knowledge of the psychology of the average man, ask of the reviewers of "These Twain" a question that is a challenge: What novel of the past year, they demand, is equal in importance to this culmination of the great Clayhanger Trilogy? I myself have no particular desire to answer this question, which wholly hinges on the definition you give to "importance." I merely wish to point out the fact that reviewers as a class are a very average set of people and susceptible to the same influences as the rest of the reading public. One of the most powerful of these influences is the now highly developed art of literary advertisement; and of this art Mr. Bennett is one of the most splendid products.

I THINK that during the past year I have read at least a dozen publishers' encomiums of their wares phrased somewhat like this: "A really important novel, suggesting in its intellectual scope and grasp upon the tendencies of modern life the best work of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett," etc., etc. I am led to feel somehow that Mr. Bennett is a great figure, a standard, a literary criterion by which to gauge lesser talents. The idea of his pre-eminence, thanks to constant iteration by publishers and journalists, has become a fixed convention. At frequent intervals I have asked my more literate friends: "Have you read Arnold Bennett?" "Oh yes!" they promptly reply with the conscious satisfaction of those who keep abreast. "Do you really like him?" I then ask steadily. "Why, of course," is the first instinctive reply. It's just like Hans Andersen's story of the Emperor's new clothes. But if you're patient, and get each one of them alone and really trustful, you'll get some surprisingly opposite confessions.

There's nothing new about this. Stevenson, back in 1882, wrote: "English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons . . .

It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness . . . preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded." To this "certain interest" Mr. Bennett makes perhaps the most consummative appeal of any writer now publishing. Certainly there is very little story in "These Twain," and that little is of the dullest, yet he does stir up in us a rebellious sense of human kinship with his characters, and he does achieve "a kind of monotonous fitness," —a fitness which, with all its monotony, is so near artistic perfection (if you once grant his premises) that on technical grounds alone you have to yield to him an unstinted admiration.

THE book deals simply with the humdrum daily life of Edwin Clayhanger and his wife, Hilda Lessways, their petty revulsions, reconciliations, and petty enthusiasms. In real life I should avoid them and all their associates as I should the plague—they answer so completely to every squalid, uncharitable, humorless impulse in one. But Mr. Bennett's presentation of them is a miracle of precision, worked out in meticulous detail, with an astuteness of psychological analysis that fairly takes your breath away—if you can keep yourself from succumbing to the dullness of the donnée. Nobody else can do this kind of thing with such perfect clarity and detachment; but how anyone other than a specialist can derive from it all a rational enjoyment, an enjoyment on any emotional plane higher than that to which mere trivial gossip aspires, I for one, don't know. "Fiction," says Stevenson elsewhere, "is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life, and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join it with all his heart . . . fiction is called romance."

The point is, I suppose, that Mr. Bennett's game in "These Twain" doesn't chime with my fancy,—but, after that, I have to admit that his technical skill very wonderfully does. As for the thousands of his professed admirers on more pedestrian grounds, I have to comfort myself with the feeling (probably a wholly incorrect one) that most of them are the unconscious victims of modern advertising methods.

TWO recent exhibitions of the "new," or "impressionist," sculpture in New York have met with an unusual amount of attention. No visitors to them can have failed to note that their newness is not, after all, so excessively new. Their resemblance to the eighth century Buddhistic statuary of China and Japan is so striking as to make timely' this reproduction, from Mr. Anesaki's notable book, of a splendid wooden sculpture of a Bodhisattva carved in circa 770 A. D.

MISS NETA SYRETT, not to be outdone by Mr. Beresford, Mr. Mackenzie, and other trilogists and near-trilogists, has recently given us the first volume of what promises to be a polytenchal novel. I hasten to commend "The Victorians" on several grounds, the first being that Miss Syrett is a writer of exceptional intelligence graced with a very pretty wit (one remembers "The Jam Queen" still with smiles). In the second place, the book is an adequate "companionpiece" to the several carefully detailed fictional biographies of young men, in that it concerns itself wholly with the very feminine reactions and career of a young girl, Rose Cottingham, from childhood to early womanhood, much on the same terms as Michael Fane is dealt with by Mr. Mackenzie in "Sinister Street." And in the third place, the thing is well done, and unflaggingly interesting. Theoretically, by far the most important contribution a woman writer (not of the fluffy-kittenish school) ought to be able to make is a feminine character analyzed with more authentic understanding and sympathy than a man can ever quite achieve. Miss Sinclair's wonderful success in "The Three Sisters" makes that book rank as a work of genius. Miss Syrett, in "The Victorians," isn't at all a genius, but she has certainly contributed in Rose a striking and charming feminine portrait that is wholly worth while. At times her sense of bouffe comes near betraying her into caricature with her minor figures, and at times the conventions of the old-fashioned British novel reach out to clutch her. But she so very pleasantly gets away with everything that in the end you feel thoroughly in her debt, and willing to follow her heroine further.

SOMEWHAT belatedly I have read "The Star Rover" by Mr. London. The story is that of a certain Professor Darrell Standing, under sentence of death in the prison of San Quentin. Subjected frequently to the tortures of the strait-jacket, he discovers a way of inducing cataleptic trances—or whatever you choose to call them. During these he lives over again a series of past lives in different ages. There are some interesting analogies to be drawn— first of all with Peter Ibbetson wno, likewise imprisoned, learns to "dream true" and has many absorbing adventures, which become dull only when he prowls back into his palaeolithic preexistences. Charlie Mears, in Mr. Kipling's "Finest Story in the World," details several adventurous pasts in full cousinship with Standing's. The device is a well tried and legitimate one for stringing together what is essentially a series of short stories on an arbitrary thread of continuity—the thread being itself a story. Taking Standing's several pasts on their own merits as separate short stories, perhaps the most vivid is that of the Mountain Meadow massacre—although when it comes to Mormon tales few are so grimly diverting as "The Destroying Angel," in "The Dynamiter." The least vivid is that in which Standing finds himself a barbarian officer at the court of Pontius Pilate and watches the culmination of the Christian tragedy. The most interesting, with a fine romantic dash, -is that which takes place in seventeenth century Korea: the least interesting are the several broken fragments of prehistoricism, where Mr. London loves to splash round like a half-grown child. On the whole, the book lacks freshness and spontaneity, and is too loosely thrown together to be effective. It's just good routine office-work.

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THERE is a certain large class of books which I enjoy very much when the place and the hour are propitious. A friend of mine calls them "Railway Novels," which sums the thing up in a nutshell Given three or four hours alone in a train, the only thing you ask of a Railway Novel is that it shall keep you reasonably oblivious of tedium and grime. The racket of the rails inhibits those critical faculties on which you plume yourself in more reposeful moments: "style" in this acrid atmosphere means nothing at all, "character-development" is quite over your clinkered head,—what you want is action and talk cunningly sandwiched so that too much strain is put neither on brain nor on eye. Mr. Louis Joseph Vance has recently beguiled one journey of mine with "Nobody." It begins delightfully. Three perfectly independent burglars are burgling the same house during a thunderstorm ; when each becomes aware of the others you surrender and forget the train. One of the burglars, a young woman, we follow through the rest of the book, her interesting adventures being those of Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model with a reasonable difference. It's an altogether satisfactory Railway Novel. A year or more ago Mr. Vance achieved something far finer, in "Joan Thursday," but that's really nothing against "Nobody," which belongs, he would himself agree, in a different class. For making another recent journey tolerable on somewhat the same terms, I am indebted to Mr. W. H. Osborne; when the train-boy offers you "The Boomerang" you can purchase it with a certain kind of confidence.

BOOKS REVIEWED

THESE TWAIN By Arnold Bennett

George H. Doran Company, New York $1.50

THE VICTORIANS By Nctta Syrett

T. Fisher Unwin, London 6s

THE STAR ROVER By Jack London

The Macmillan Company, New York $1.50

NOBODY By Louis Joseph Vance

George H. Doran Company, New York $1.35

THE BOOMERANG By William Hamilton Osborne McBride, Nast & Company, New York $1.35