‘The man is most honest, and anxious to do justice,’ wrote Arnold Bennett in his Journal on 28 May 1896, in reference to the publishers reader’s report on his first novel by John Buchan, ‘but he clearly has not been able quite to sympathize with the latest disciple of the de Goncourts.’ There is perhaps something a little dandyish in thus labelling oneself but Bennett makes it abundantly clear in his letters and elsewhere in his Journal that, though he does not regard the de Goncourts as the best writers who have influenced him (that place probably goes to Turgenev), he would never dissociate himself from the basically realistic aims of the brothers. This was for him a matter both of technique and attitude. In his Journal for 15 October 1896 he describes the first requirement of a novelist as an all-embracing Christlike compassion and, whether he can emulate the Deity or not, his range of sympathies is remarkably wide and extends very far into the mundane. His original field of study and the one at which he most excelled was the Midland middle class, sometimes in very comfortable circumstances but essentially ordinary. When Frank Harris complained that Sophia Baines in The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) did not rise to a great passion so as to make a contrast between her and her sister—‘the contrast between the mangy tabby-cat and the superb wild animal’ -Bennett replied: ‘At bottom I regard your attitude as flavoured with a youthful sentimentality. At bottom I am proudly content with the Pentonville omnibus.’1
There is a similar conscious down-to-earthness in his attitude to his craft; he was very much the professional man of letters. He knew perfectly well that his reputation, and even his long-term income, would depend upon those novels which he took seriously; in this he was right and, though some of the novels which he liked have not stood the test of a few generations’ reading, in general his judgement of his own work was remarkably sound. But he also wrote avowedly commercial novels and plays, going so far as to use the word ‘pot-boiler’ and explaining that he found that he could write them easily and regarded such writing as an honest trade. In so far as Bennett has been greatly misunderstood and grossly underrated, it is his pot-boiling novels and journalism which have been partly to blame. His attitude to them - the extent to which he did not let them use up much of his energy - is indicated by the fact that he wrote Buried Alive in eight weeks during the composition of The Old Wives’ Tale.
Throughout his career Bennett also wrote literary and other journalism and here, likewise, the degree of seriousness and value varies greatly, though what impresses one most is his range of interests. If we glance through Books and Persons (1917), a selection of the weekly articles which he contributed as ‘Jacob Tonson’ to The New Age between 1908 and 1911, we find not only discussions of general topics and now forgotten writers but also essays on Mallarmé, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky as well as more expected ones on Wells, Kipling, Conrad, Meredith, Anatole France, Galsworthy, and Mase-field. His tastes were astonishingly wide. In the period in which he was writing Clayhanger (January to June 1910), for example, his Journal records not only what might be expected of any educated man of his time - regular visits to the theatre and the opera, a lot of sketching in Florence, the reading of Flaubert’s correspondence and of Stendhal - but also discussions with friends of Matisse, Bonnard, Etruscan tombs, Picasso, particular enjoyment of Monteverdi and Richard Strauss, and the entertaining to tea of Ravel (with whom he played duets) and his mother. He was a writer about limited and provincial people who was one of the least limited and least ‘provincial’ of English writers.
He staked out his chosen territory with his first novel, A Man from the North (1898), and consolidated his hold in his first novel of real value, Anna of the Five Towns, published in 1902. By ‘territory’ here I do not only mean that, like most of his significant novels, Anna is set in his re-creation of the Potteries but also that it touches on most of the major themes which were to preoccupy him. The Potteries, indeed, are only of interest for him as an outward form for a whole set of assumptions and a way of life. As he wrote to Lady St Helier on 22 June 1912: One can only tolerate them by living in them.’ The novel has a melodramatic snap ending for the last two or three pages which is altogether unworthy of the book, but apart from that it is characterized by the even-paced sobriety appropriate to that stifling of spontaneity which he sees as lying at the heart of the society which he depicts. This evenness of tone is broken from time to time, as it is throughout his major work, by sudden, almost epigrammatic flashes of harsh insight which give the effect of great energy underlying the inhibited surface. These flashes normally concern the victims of complacency and philistine acquisitiveness. The most striking example in this book comes in the description of the old servant, Sarah Vodrey: ‘After fifty years of ceaseless labour, she had gained the affection of one person, and enough money to pay for het own funeral’ (12). Bennett has, indeed, great understanding of the narrowed and the shrunken, and in this novel he treats at length what is to be one of his major themes - jocularly in Helen with the High Hand,2 seriously in the late novel about London, Riceyman Steps (1923), and most successfully in Clayhanger (1910) and The Old Wives’ Tale—the effects of avarice. Miserliness, as the enemy of spontaneity and joy, is shown not as a wanton aberration but as the extreme end of that respectable, chapel-attending, dutiful, and self-respecting thrift which that hypothetical man on the Pentonville omnibus would not wish to deny.
Bennett also has a much more real sense than most contemporary novelists of the reality of poverty, of the want which makes money the first step towards a decent life. Nowhere is this more effective and moving than in his treatment of Darius Clayhanger. The reader is shown the destitution of Darius’s childhood, the shame of being sent to the ‘Bastille’, the workhouse, which lies beneath his obsession with security of possessions; his son Edwin knows nothing of this and can despise his father’s tight-fistedness. Bennett comments, when Darius dies: ‘The vast and forlorn adventure of the little boy from the Bastille was over. Edwin did not know that the little boy from the Bastille was dead’ (in. 17) and, a little later ‘They were all in clover, thanks to the terrible lifelong obstinacy of the little boy from the Bastille’ (iv. 1). But if we reflect for a little on that ‘in clover’ we shall also see that it is not totally contemptuous. Bennett is, as Virginia Woolf said, a materialist; he knows perfectly well that people are defined in part by their jobs, their habits, their possessions, and also that they define themselves thus. Edwin Clayhanger, for example, is fascinated by the new house which has the magic of new potentialities of activity and quietly proud of that success in his work which enables him to set Hilda’s affairs straight. It would have been inconceivable for Bennett to have sought our approval for a character denouncing possessions, as Birkin does in Lawrence’s Women in Love, while relying on the secure competence of ‘about four hundred a year.’
I shall have more to say later about the famous attack of Virginia Woolf on Bennett on the grounds that he was a ‘materialist’ but it is necessary to point out here that materialism, in some senses, is central to Bennett’s whole aim. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, in Howards End, speaks of standing on £600 a year, and Forster agrees with her that it is dishonest not to recognize that civilized life depends upon a secure income. But this is a very abstract realization; Forster cannot, and admits that he cannot, really imagine what life would be like for those with, say, £120 or £250 and how a man who moved from £120 to £600 would change his ideas and aspirations in the process. Bennett said in an essay on ‘The Middle Classes’ that what distinguished them was that ‘they never look twice at twopence’. He himself was never poor, though his father had been and, unlike Darius, had not concealed the fact, but he had seen poverty and, good follower of the de Goncourts that he was, had done his homework. He thought it his duty as a novelist, as well as a man, to understand what life was like for those who had to count twopence or had had to do so.
This is one aspect of the fact that Bennett, unlike most novelists of his time, writes novels about those who are very different from himself and, by most judgements, less intelligent, less experienced in the world, and less sophisticated. It is unusual in a twentieth-century novelist to deal so consistently, in serious works, with characters at a ‘lower’ level than both the writer and the hypothetical readers. It was not, of course, uncommon in earlier fiction. I do not have in mind those studies - Emma and Middlemarch may stand as examples - in which the writer and the implied reader are conceived as older and wiser than central characters who are potentially of their own emotional and intellectual stature, but those in which the central character is, inherently and permanently, less intelligent or sophisticated. Tom Jones, however old he grows, will not be as shrewd as Fielding; none of Trollope’s characters will see all round things as he does; Tess and Jude exemplify the tragedies of those whose plight we can understand but could not share. Henry James is more typical of modern fiction in his avowed interest in those who can comprehend their plights, and most English novelists of our own century have concerned themselves with emotional and intellectual experiences akin to their own. The revelations which they offer us are the revelations of their own characters - of Paul Morel and Birkin, of Margaret Schlegel and Fielding, of Mrs Dalloway and Lily Briscoe. Even those who sometimes offer us an understanding which is denied any of their characters, as Conrad does in his political novels or Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, also offer us the insights of Marlow and Stephen Dedalus. Bennett never does this in his major works; the understanding which we have of the Baines sisters or Anna Tellwright or Edwin Clayhanger is something which we share with Bennett and not with the characters themselves. Doubtless this has something to do with his declared realistic method and the great influence on him of French fiction. He shares it with Balzac and Flaubert and Stendhal. It also has to do with his temperament, which we may reasonably call democratic, in the sense that he accepts the Pentonville omnibus and has little sense of an emotional or spiritual élite.
Nowhere is this more clear than in what most readers would regard as, with Clayhanger, his best work, The Old Wives’ Tale. The obvious danger for a writer who chooses as his subject the lives of two provincial, slightly educated, and rather unimaginative women is that he will allow us to patronize them, either because he is patronizing them himself or because his narrative tone is not sufficiently secure to keep us in order; the dangers, in short, are either that we will connive with him in patronage or that we patronize both the characters and their creator. Bennett runs both risks at the start of the novel. The opening sentence is striking, implying that we already have some community of experience with the narrator - ‘Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to the manifold interests of their situation, of which, indeed, they had never been conscious.’ We realize its purpose fairly soon, though; Bennett is telling us, rather jocularly, a good deal about Staffordshire and about the time in which the opening of the novel is set (‘The crinoline had not quite reached its full circumference, and the dress-improver had not even been thought of’) but mostly he takes up the position of a commentator from within the adult world of the Five Towns who is contemplating the inexperience of the young. He is shrewd and humorous though his approach is inoffensive and, it might seem, in danger of cosiness. Of Mrs Baines, for example, we are told: ‘She was stout; but the fashions, prescribing vague outlines, broad downward slopes, and vast amplitudes, were favourable to her shape. It must not be supposed that stout women of a certain age never seek to seduce the eye and trouble the meditations of man by other than moral charms’ (1. 3).
But he takes us closer to his personages and engages our sympathies by an acute psychological penetration into the feelings of girls discovering what their feelings are. Sophia, preached to by her paralysed and bedridden father, discovers that the ‘grotesqueness of her father’s complacency humiliated her past bearing’. Constance discovers, muddledly, that she does not want Samuel Povey mocked. It is only when we are no longer in any danger of sneering at his characters and rather may feel that Bennett is accepting the outlook of Bursley that he begins to widen the possible frame of reference. He does it, at times, harshly. The best example is, I think, what he says near the beginning of the second part of the novel about the servant Maggie, who is giving notice in preparation for her marriage:
His treatment of Samuel Povey is throughout a fine example of how he holds the balance: Povey is limited, he is often ineffectual; he only comes to be recognized by his community as a solid and successful man when he refuses to sell his best cloth to make a coat for a miner’s dog and orders the man out of his shop—a scene where our judgement is likely to be very different from that of his fellow-citizens; he has, as we are specifically told, ‘a certain officious self-importance’ when he wakes Constance to break the news to her of Daniel Povey’s killing of his wife; and yet, in this very matter of Daniel’s crime and sentence, he brings about his own death by his efforts and earns, from us as well as Bennett, the epitaph: ‘He was a very honest man’ (II. 5).
It is in the treatment of the two old wives of the title that we may study more effectively that implied conflict between two kinds of judgement. I have already quoted Bennett’s repudiation of Frank Harris’s characterization of the two as a tabby cat and an at least potential wild animal, but it is true that the great separation of their lives means that, however far he may wish us to see that they are both deeply rooted in St Luke’s Square and its values, he is nevertheless contrasting, overtly or by implication, the woman who seems not to have to make choices with the woman who has. It is in the character of Sophia, therefore, that we meet most often the moment of choice at which more than one judgement of value, more, sometimes, than one whole way of life, is in question.
We might ask Frank Harris’s question, I think, without its being simply a rhetorical one. She is at the start lively, beautiful, and with a quality of sexual energy which Bennett brings out in a superb erotic image when he describes Gerald kissing her:
She ends, back in St Luke’s Square, feeling that ‘not for millions of pounds would she live her life over again’ (iv. 2), squabbling with her sister, childless and wishing that she had a son and cossetting an aged dog. Why? Bennett shows her enduring a number of experiences which might frustrate any impulse towards sexual love: Gerald proves totally feckless, takes her to the public execution, and goes off with another woman while leaving Sophia in a squalid room, overhearing the ‘whisperings; long sighs suddenly stifled; mysterious groans as of torture, broken by a giggle’ (m. 3) of her neighbours while they wait for the guillotining; later he proves not only unfaithful but treacherous. When she is ill she is looked after in the house of Mme Foucault, the bedizened and ageing courtesan; when she is running the boarding house it is Niepce, who seems virtually senile, who tries to make love to her; Chirac touches her feelings, but she is by this time worn out by strain and slightly contemptuous of his self-dramatization. He dies in the balloon flight out of besieged Paris. By this time she is efficient, proud, isolated. I think that nowadays most of us would feel not only that the sexuality of a woman like Sophia would be more urgent, would overcome these obstacles, but also that her sexuality would be only a component part of an urge towards companionship, friendship, some shared human activity. But Bennett’s temperament did not make him see matters this way; the tradition of French fiction, which was so important to Bennett, has always tended to take sexual love as an isolated, definable, and possibly unrelated feeling, more a matter of a specific visitation than a leaning, and the standards of the fiction of 1908 made it easy for him to follow this course. Naturally enough the standards by which she judges the inadequacy of her husband or the kind incompetence of Mme Foucault are, basically, those she has acquired in Bursley. It is inevitable, surely, that when Chirac helps her in the hotel after the guillotining, while Gerald lies drunk asleep, she reverts to the shop to express her feeling—‘he had successfully passed through the ordeal of seeing the wrong side of the stuff of her life’. What is significant is that the values which are strongest and which enable her to survive are those which we feel to be ambiguous, just as Samuel Povey’s self-assertion to the collier is for his peers a proof of independence and strength (and we respect this) and simultaneously a judgement on the limitations of that society.
Hard practicality and self-respect save Sophia; looking at the wreck of Mme Foucault she thinks: ‘If I had been in her place, I shouldn’t have been like that. I should have been rich. I should have saved like a miser. I wouldn’t have been dependent on anybody at that age’ (m. 5). We applaud; to speak of saving like a miser is hyperbole. But it is not long before, during the siege of Paris, she is described in the classic posture of the miser:
There is a significant echo of a much earlier time during her stay with Mme Foucault; she goes, shaky and convalescent, to explore the flat and
What the reader remembers is that when we first encountered Sophia with her sister looking out at St Luke’s Square it is so that they can watch the drudge Maggie and make fun of her grotesque romance. It is not surprising that, though Sophia is scrupulously honest to her clients and generous when she can afford to be, she establishes Fren-shams by ‘employing two servants, working them very hard at low wages’ (hi. 7).
The virtues of Bursley are what save Sophia from disaster and we cannot but sympathize with her practical dealing with Mme Foucault and the boarding house; but the virtues are limited and have their own price. There is, I think, nothing sadder in the book than her reflection, after she has been told of Chirac’s presumed death and has realized that though she feels loss it is not acute, for Chirac would never have attracted her powerfully: ‘She continued to dream, at rare intervals, of the kind of passion that would have satisfied her, glowing but banked down like a fire in some fine chamber of a rich but careful household’ (ill. 7).
She meets her match, however. Her toughness, growing as it does from the roots of Bursley, is no proof against the similar tenacity of her sister; the struggle between them provides another conflict in which we see that what makes for restriction and inhibition comes from attitudes which we have been made to respect and that we have so far absorbed the values of St Luke’s Square that we ourselves are dubious about what offers enjoyment. Sophia and the doctor discuss what would be best for Constance; she is a rich woman; she need not continue living in the old dark house; she and her sister could live anywhere. Their conversation is reasonable but we know that they are enjoying themselves knowing best. We recognize that they are right, and yet everything in their conversation grates. When the doctor says: ‘What she needs is the bustle of life in a good hotel, a good hydro, for instance. Among jolly people. Parties! Games! Excursions! She wouldn’t be the same woman’ (iv. 3), we feel that he is vulgar and obtuse. When the conflict between the sisters comes into the open it is notable that Constance has little to say, and that she needs to say little. The quarrel is both upsetting and, in its lack of logical encounter, comic. Sophia says:
What most strikes us here is a sense which is central to the whole book of minds made up and decisions taken without conscious reflection, and of the privacy of individual experience.
The only reasons which Constance can give as to why she should not seize the opportunity of having an altogether easier life are obviously inadequate ones about the need to keep the house clean. Not only does Bennett remind us of what we know already, that people habitually give inadequate or irrelevant reasons for what they do, but he is also able to make us feel the strength of her feelings because we have acquired, in the course of the book, a striking sense of an individuality which has grown unwatched and unknown to others and we know that this individuality is inextricably joined to the house.
It has often been said that the main theme of The Old Wives’ Tale is the passage of time and this is obviously true; Sophia’s awareness, as she looks at her husband’s dead body, of what life has done to him is the clearest example, and the point does not need labouring. But this sense of privacy, of a world in which people keep their own counsel, of essential loneliness, is equally strong. We find out about decisions like Sophia’s elopement and Mrs Baines’s decision to go and live with her sister after they are made in secrecy. The world of the novel is one where people shut up their thoughts from others, partly because of a desire not to be talked into or out of things and partly because sometimes to reveal them would be damaging. The most dramatic revelation of the book occurs in the chapter, ‘Another Crime’, which follows on from ‘Crime’ which recounts the discovery that Constance and Samuel’s son has been pilfering from the till of the shop. It seems to me typical that Bennett plays fair with the reader by labelling what we are to expect but doing so in such a way that we are misled precisely because, like his characters, we do not expect disaster. The second crime, however, is truly disastrous; Samuel Povey learns that his cousin’s wife is an alcoholic and that Daniel Povey has killed her in a fit of rage at her neglect of their sick son. But before Samuel discovers this he sees the bakehouse in his cousin’s yard with ‘naked figures strangely moving in it’. For Daniel this is normal night baking and he does not see that for Samuel it is a sudden revelation of a whole area of life just as unknown to him as the squalid secret which has not yet been revealed, so that he never again, we are told, ate a mouthful of bread without remembering that ‘midnight apparition’.
It is fitting that the conclusion of the novel, Constance’s death-bed ruminations, should maintain this pattern. She reviews her life and her feelings about those close to her. All her reflections would surprise the objects of them: her pity for Sophia’s wasted life, her knowledge that she has spoiled her son and that it would probably have made no difference if she had not, and, finally, her judgement on her favourites, Dick and Lily. ‘The secret attitude of both of them towards her was one of good-natured condescension, expressed in the tone in which they would say to each other, “the old lady”. Perhaps they would have been startled to know that Constance lovingly looked down on both of them’ (iv. 5).
This theme is reinforced, as I have suggested of the scene in the bakery, by the imagery of the book and especially by the symbolic significance which accretes around places. Bennett is not given to producing obvious symbolic properties unless, like the shop signboard and the changes made to it, they are public symbols chosen as such by the characters. His method is normally to describe things in terms of their use or their significance to the characters and to leave the resonances to emerge. The shop and the house, in particular, are central and we grow accustomed to seeing them as carrying meanings for the characters and for us. When Constance lets the shop go and keeps the house and, irritated by dilatory workmen and dust, watches the bricking up of the doorway between them, it is clear to us because it is clear to her that a portion of her past is being shut off.
Houses do become symbolic to us in just this way and in this book, as in life, the house plays its part in the rites de passage of its inhabitants: Book I ends with the departure of Mrs Baines as the new generation takes charge in the persons of Constance and Samuel Povey; Book II ends with the departure of Cyril for London and his mother’s return to the house (this was the section which Bennett said was his favourite); Book in, being devoted to Sophia, cannot end with the house - the return of Sophia to St Luke’s Square must wait for the Book which she is to share with Constance and there the house is of immense significance to both of them.
The mental wanderings of Constance in the delirium of her deathbed bring to the fore one of the images of the house which most underlines the sense of the hidden and secret nature of individual experience:
Though we have visited those cellars in a practical frame of mind to discover, for example, Cyril hiding there and covered in coal dust, this image re-creates that sense of mystery which is described - with the echoed phrase ‘the vast obscure of those regions’ - as the childhood feeling of the sisters.
There is an even more explicit symbolic suggestion of what lies hidden in human experience in the presence of the empty room which is never entered and which is described at the very beginning of the book:
It is typical of Bennett that, having offered a symbolic empty room in the middle of their house - next, indeed, to their bedroom -, he then explains it in terms of architectural incompetence. It is equally typical that, much later in the novel, after describing Constance watching the door being bricked up we are told that
The room is, after all, something more than an architectural incompetence.
Such echoes and repetition are also important, regardless of how much symbolic resonance we see in them, as a way of giving a sense of shape or rhythm to a story which, in the nature of things, must be in danger of seeming simply chronological. Bennett’s concept of form and structure was a rather loose one in the novels which he took seriously. He produces neat and essentially traditional plots in pot-boilers like Helen with the High Hand or The Card (1911). But in his serious novels he is seeking a much less fixed sort of pattern; when the novel, for one reason or another, fails the result is scrappiness. The Pretty Lady (1918), for example, is an astonishing hotchpotch. There is a scene in which the prostitute, Christine, who is taking a mad officer to the station to catch his train back to the front, loses him. Her chase through the streets and the growing sense of suppressed panic gives a striking, almost surrealist image of the discontinuities of experienee; the description of the Zeppelin raid, some of the war-committee scenes, the relationship between Christine and her maid are all first-rate. But they are set, cheek by jowl with other sections of the book which are often downright dull or unconvincing (the central male character who should link things together fails totally to do so, except in the most mechanical way) and which do not appear to belong together. What we have is a jumble with good bits. In places it reminds me of such early novels by intelligent writers as Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out where scenes are inserted because the writer has something he, or she, wants to say and is determined to put it in regardless of any sense of formal propriety.
The Old Wives’ Tale, similarly, has very little fixed pattern. Bennett is committed to showing the lives of ‘those two girls’ and this implies a chronological succession. He is obliged to leave Sophia in abeyance while he deals with Constance, rather than intercutting sections of their lives, because it is part of his view that each is separate and he will not risk letting us feel that Sophia is more than a memory for Constance. Moreover such intercutting (the possibility of which he was well aware of, to judge from his critical comments on various writers) would direct attention towards his shaping and take it away from our sense of the slow development of the people, would, in short, detract from the temporal for the benefit of the spatial. Furthermore, though he must, to do justice to what is significant for them, deal with the major events of their lives - Sophia’s elopement, Samuel’s death, Cyril’s birth - he often chooses to deal with them rather briefly and we are more often aware of how he seems to have come to the same conclusion as did Virginia Woolf, that the novelist should not take it for granted ‘that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. The set pieces which we remember - the children’s party, for example - are often such apparently small matters. Often, too, they highlight an emotional process which is then left to happen off-stage and whose culmination is treated very briefly. Gerald’s foolish squabble in the restaurant and his blustering return to Sophia and the squalid deceits of the guillotine party are vivid; after that, Bennett seems to imply by his omissions, the steady erosion of love and trust goes on in a more subterranean manner.
Many of the more important sections are quite deliberately nonclimactic. In Book iv, Chapter 3, for example, what seems most important is Sophia’s reproach to Cyril for not having come home to see his mother and the way that this becomes a cosy chat between them, but this is muddled in with the plan for the sisters to go to a hotel and with the bad behaviour of the servant Amy, provoked by Sophia’s rebuke, itself provoked by Amy’s having kicked Sophia’s poodle. The deepest feelings of the characters are roused but they are mixed with the daily clutter and are transformed into apparent trivialities. The basic structure of most novels comes from a sense of a problem to be solved or a quest or a trial with the author judging the characters, who often also judge themselves, on their success or failure. Bennett shows his characters making sense of their lives as they live them, but there is little sense of assessment. Sophia suddenly thinks, as she runs the Pension Frensham, ‘How strange it is that I should be here, doing what I am doing!’, Constance comes to feel that she will always be an intermediary between her husband and her son, but such perceptions do not encourage us to plot these moments as points on a chart leading somewhere. It is this sense of moments of insight coming in the midst of ordinariness which presumably caused Bennett to choose for Book iv what seems at first an almost excessive title ‘What Life Is’.3
But there are patterns, though tentative and never obtrusive; often, though not always, we share the perceptions of the characters. Cyril is to Constance as Sophia is to Mrs Baines; we see this because Constance sees it. As the demonstration against Daniel Povey winds through the town, Bennett reflects that ‘Since the execution of the elephant, nothing had so profoundly agitated Bursley’ (II. 5). Not only do we think of the innocence of the elephant but also remember that but for it Sophia would never have met Gerald. Looking from a window in Paris in convalescence is for Sophia like looking from a window in Bursley as a child; the back regions of the house, as we have seen, link childhood and old age. When Sophia returns to Bursley Constance takes a circuitous route to the station, ‘so that, if stopped by acquaint-anees, she should not be too obviously going to the station’ (iv. 2); this links with various other evasive manœuvres, like Mrs Baines going out to see the altered signboard and not, as Constance thinks, her husband’s grave, but it also reminds us more specifically of Sophia’s excursion to see Gerald, without which there would have been no occasion to meet her on a return from a long absence.
The Old Wives’ Tale is characteristic of Bennett in its sad but not despairing vision. No doubt any complete life story is likely to produce an effect of some gloom, for it is bound to end with ageing and death and in this book there are two main characters to die. But his view throughout his career is consistent. His pot-boilers may be jolly, but the serious works all share an awareness, not only of inevitable age and death but also of opportunities lost and joys forgone. Edwin Clay-hanger is successful in his career and he marries the woman whom he loves, but for most of the book he is suppressed and his marriage, when at last it comes, produces an effect of only measured happiness. Clearly Bennett thought with Thoreau that most people lead lives of quiet desperation. What makes him remarkable is, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, that he writes of very ordinary people and does not allow us to condescend to them. He is the least autobiographical of novelists and his vision is an unusually democratic one. He believed in realism and he believed that realism was moral. He is very specific about this in a little book, not in general of a great deal of interest though, like all his books, containing good things, called The Author’s Craft which was published in 1914.