Books and Persons by Arnold Bennett (top 10 books of all time TXT) 📖

in the business. But my notion about Cezanne was that he was a fond old man who distracted himself by daubing. I could not say how my conversion to Cezanne began. When one is not a practising expert in an art, a single word, a single intonation, uttered by an expert whom one esteems, may commence a process of change which afterwards seems to go on by itself. But I remember being very much impressed by a still-life--some fruit in a bowl--and on approaching it I saw Cezanne's clumsy signature in the corner. From that moment the revelation was swift. And before I had seen any Gauguins at all, I was prepared to consider Gauguin with sympathy. The others followed naturally. I now surround myself with large photographs of these pictures of which a dozen years ago I was certainly quite incapable of perceiving the beauty. The best still-life studies of Cezanne seem to me to have the grandiose quality of epics. And that picture by Gauguin, showing the back of a Tahitian young man with a Tahitian girl on either side of him, is an affair which I regard with acute pleasure every morning. There are compositions by Vuillard which equally enchant me. Naturally I cannot accept the whole school--no more than the whole of any school. I have derived very little pleasure from Matisse, and the later developments of Felix Vallotton leave me in the main unmoved. But one of the very latest phenomena of the school--the water-colours of Pierre Laprade--I have found ravishing.

* * * * *


It is in talking to several of these painters, in watching their familiar deportment, and particularly in listening to their conversations with others on subjects other than painting, that I have come to connect their ideas with literature. They are not good theorizers about art; and I am not myself a good theorizer about art; a creative artist rarely is. But they do ultimately put their ideas into words. You may receive one word one day and the next next week, but in the end an idea gets itself somehow stated. Whenever I have listened to Laprade criticizing pictures, especially students' work, I have thought about literature; I have been forced to wonder whether I should not have to reconsider my ideals. The fact is that some of these men are persuasive in themselves. They disengage, in their talk, in their profound seriousness, in their sense of humour, in the sound organization of their industry, and in their calm assurance--they disengage a convincingness that is powerful beyond debate. An artist who is truly original cannot comment on boot-laces without illustrating his philosophy and consolidating his position. Noting in myself that a regular contemplation of these pictures inspires a weariness of all other pictures that are not absolutely first rate, giving them a disconcerting affinity to the tops of chocolate-boxes or to "art" photographs, I have permitted myself to suspect that supposing some writer were to come along and do in words what these men have done in paint, I might conceivably be disgusted with nearly the whole of modern fiction, and I might have to begin again. This awkward experience will in all probability not happen to me, but it might happen to a writer younger than me. At any rate it is a fine thought. The average critic always calls me, both in praise and dispraise, "photographic"; and I always rebut the epithet with disdain, because in the sense meant by the average critic I am not photographic. But supposing that in a deeper sense I were? Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my contemporaries--us who fancy ourselves a bit--to admit that we had been concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying ourselves to achieve infantile realisms? Well, that day would be a great and a disturbing day--for us.



1911

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

[_12 Jan. '11_]

The practice of reviewing the literature of the year at the end thereof is now decaying. Newspapers still give a masterly survey of the motor-cars of the year. I remember the time when it was part of my duty as a serious journalist to finish at Christmas a two-thousand word article, full of discrimination as fine as Irish lace, about the fiction of the year; and other terrifying specialists were engaged to deal amply with the remaining branches of literature. To-day, one man in one column and one day will polish off what five of us scarcely exhausted in seven columns and seven days. I am referring to the distant past of a dozen years ago, before William de Morgan was born, and before America and Elinor Glyn had discovered each other. Last week many newspapers dismissed the entire fiction of 1910 in a single paragraph. The consequence is that there has been no "book of the year." A critic without space to spread himself hesitates to pronounce downright for a particular book. A critic engaged in the dangerous art of creating the "book of the year" wants room to hedge, and in the newest journalism there is no room to hedge. So the critic refrains from the act of creation. He imitates the discretion of the sporting tipster, who names several horses as being likely to win one race. "Among the books of the year are Blank, Blank, and Blank," he says. (But what he means is, "The book of the year is to be found among Blank, Blank, and Blank.") Naturally he selects among the books whose titles come into his head with the least difficulty; that is to say, the books which he has most recently reviewed; that is to say, the books published during the autumn season. No doubt during the spring season he has distinguished several books as being "great," "masterly," "unforgettable," "genius"; but ere the fall of the leaf these works have completely escaped from his memory. No author, and particularly no novelist who wishes to go down to posterity, should publish during the spring season; it is fatal.

* * * * *


The celebrated "Dop Doctor" (published by Heinemann) and Mr. Temple Thurston's "City of Beautiful Nonsense" (published by Chapman and Hall) have both sold very well indeed throughout the entire year. In fact, they were selling better in December than many successful novels published in the autumn. Yet neither of them, assuming that there had been a book of the year, would have had much chance of being that book. The reason is that they have not been sufficiently "talked about." I mean "talked about" by "the right people." And by "right people" I mean the people who make a practice of dining out at least three times a week in the West End of London to the accompaniment of cultured conversation. I mean the people who are "in the know," politically, socially, and intellectually--who know what Mr. F.E. Smith says to Mr. Winston Churchill in private, why Mrs. Humphry Ward made such an enormous pother at the last council meeting of the Authors' Society, what is really the matter with Mr. Bernard Shaw's later work, whether Mr. Balfour does indeed help Mr. Garvin to write the _Daily Telegraph_ leaders, and whether the Savoy Restaurant is as good under the new management as under the old. I reckon there are about 12,055 of these people. They constitute the elite. Without their aid, without their refined and judicial twittering, no book can hope to be a book of the year.

Now I am in a position to state that no novel for very many years has been so discussed by the elite as Mr. Forster's "Howard's End" (published by Edward Arnold). The ordinary library reader knows that it has been a very considerable popular success; persons of genuine taste know that it is a very considerable literary achievement; but its triumph is that it has been mightily argued about during the repasts of the elite. I need scarcely say that it is not Mr. Forster's best book; no author's best book is ever the best received--this is a rule practically without exception. A more curious point about it is that it contains a lot of very straight criticism of the elite. And yet this point is not very curious either. For the elite have no objection whatever to being criticized. They rather like it, as the alligator likes being tickled with peas out of a pea-shooter. Their hides are superbly impenetrable. And I know not which to admire the more, the American's sensitiveness to pea-shooting, or the truly correct Englishman's indestructible indifference to it. Mr. Forster is a young man. I believe he is still under thirty, if not under twenty-nine. If he continues to write one book a year regularly, to be discreet and mysterious, to refrain absolutely from certain themes, and to avoid a too marked tendency to humour, he will be the most fashionable novelist in England in ten years' time. His worldly prospects are very brilliant indeed. If, on the other hand, he writes solely to please himself, forgetting utterly the existence of the elite, he may produce some first-class literature. The responsibilities lying upon him at this crisis of his career are terrific. And he so young too!


"THE NEW MACHIAVELLI"

[_2 Feb. '11_]

A pretty general realization of the extremely high quality of "The New Machiavelli" has reduced almost to silence the ignoble tittle-tattle that accompanied its serial publication in the _English Review_. It is years since a novel gave rise to so much offensive and ridiculous chatter before being issued as a book. When the chatter began, dozens of people who would no more dream of paying four-and-sixpence for a new novel that happened to be literature than they would dream of paying four-and-sixpence for a cigar, sent down to the offices of the _English Review_ for complete sets of back numbers at half a crown a number, so that they could rummage without a moment's delay among the earlier chapters in search of tit-bits according to their singular appetite. Such was the London which calls itself literary and political! A spectacle to encourage cynicism! Rumour had a wonderful time. It was stated that not only the libraries but the booksellers also would decline to handle "The New Machiavelli." The reasons for this prophesied ostracism were perhaps vague, but they were understood to be broad-based upon the unprecedented audacity of the novel. And really in this exciting year, with Sir Percy Bunting in charge of the national sense of decency, and Mr. W.T. Stead still gloating after twenty-five years over his success in keeping Sir Charles Dilke out of office--you never can tell what may happen!

* * * * *


However, it is all over now. "The New Machiavelli" has been received with the respect and with the enthusiasm which its tremendous qualities deserve. It is a great success. And the reviews have on the whole been generous. It was perhaps not to be expected that certain Radical dailies should swallow the entire violent dose of the book without kicking up a fuss; but, indeed, Mr. Scott-James, in the _Daily News_, ought to know better than to go running about after autobiography in fiction. The human nose was not