Studies in the Sources of Arnold Bennett's Novels

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STUDIES IN THE SOURCES OF ARNOLD BENNETT'S NOVELS

Louis TILLIER Agrégé de l'Université Docteur ès Lettres

STUDIES IN

THE SOURCES OF ARNOLD BENNETT'S NOVELS

Published with the assistance of the Centre national de la Recherche scientifique

DIDIER 4 et 6, rue de la Sorbonne PARIS 14, rue 'des Comédiens 1442, av. McGill College BRUXELLES MONTR13AL

CONTENTS

Introduction 7

I. The sources of A Man from the North I. Autobiographical elements 13 II. The influence of Bel-Ami 20

II. Literary influences and personal memories in Anna of the Five Towns 25

III. The sources of Sacred and Profane Love 32 IV. The growth of The Old Wives' Tale I. The original idea and its transformation ... 39 II. The Old Wives' Tale and previous works by Arnold Bennett 42 III. French literary influences 44 IV. Local history 48 V. Rivain's execution 52 VI. The Siege of Paris 57 VII. The federation of the Five Towns 66 VIII. Prototypes of characters 70 V. The Card in life and fiction 74

VI. The theosophical and other sources of The Glimpse .. 84 VII. The sources of Clayhanger I. Sociological research 109 II. Personal impressions and memories 124 VIII. From Coquette to Lilian 138 IX. The genesis of Riceyman Steps I. From environment through character to action 143 II. Pinks and Wood's History of Clerkenwell .. 147 X. Is Lord Raingo a roman-a-clef ? I. The Bennett-Birkenhead controversy 155 II. Lord Raingo and Lord Rhondda 158 III. The War Cabinet 164 XI. Imperial Palace and French naturalism 168

XII. From An Experiment with Time to Dream of Destiny . 176 Conclusions 183 Bibliography . 189 Index ..../£■-v!" ...... 193

INTRODUCTION

During the score of years that have passed since Arnold Bennett died1, his fame has suffered the eclipse which is the common posthumous lot of all popular writers, an eclipse made perhaps more complete in his particular case by the attacks to which his reputation had already been subjected, in his lifetime, by the spokes- men of the younger generation. In spite of his attempt to achieve variety, half-way through his career, by changing his scene from Staffordshire to London, and of his efforts to keep abreast with the spirit of the age, advanced literary opinion in the twenties already considered him somewhat old-fashioned; and Virginia Woolf, waging war on the leading novelists of the preceding period, and confidently declaring that "the sooner English fiction turn[ed] its back upon them, the better for its soul" 2, treated him (not without reason) as the most typical representative of that "materialism" which also vitiated, in her eyes, the work of Wells and Galsworthy. The English novel, after a certain amount of wavering, has declined to answer the call, or follow in the footsteps of Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. Though it has gained, in depth and subtlety, by the bold experiments of the nineteen twenties, it appears to-day 1, half-way through the century, as being rather more akin in structure and spirit to the four-square narratives of Edwardian days than to the neo-Georgian transcriptions of evanescent moods and feelings. That reaction, it might be argued, is the price the novel has had to pay for its survival as a genre. This may account for the fact that Arnold Bennett's reputation as a novelist — for it is only with the novelist that we are concerned here, as distinct from the writer of fantasias or short stories, the dramatist, the critic or the "pocket philosopher" — has stood the test of time better than might, in the adverse circumstances, have been expected. The popular press, when referring to him in the anec- dotes of its gossip columns, or quoting one of his pronouncements, still does not feel the need to explain who he was. Public librarians report a moderate but steady demand for his books, though the mere pot-boilers are gradually sinking into a well-deserved oblivion. Recent

.j.This was written in 1948, the following studies being submitted as a subsidiary thesis for the doctorate of literature to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris in January 1949. Various changes — mostly additions — have been made at the time of publication. 2. Essay on Modern Fiction, reprinted in The Common Reader, pp. 184-95. criticism provides a pointer in the same direction. In spite of the keen interest aroused in 1939 by Georges Lafourcade's somewhat controversial Study3, the war, which broke out soon after its appearance and which was to delay by half-a-dozen years that of M. M. Locherbie-Goff's Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett4, might well have "killed" Bennett for good. In actual fact however, the recent publication of Walter Allen's essay5, and the welcome it has received from the press, has afforded fresh evidence, not of a revival, but of a survival of interest6. This essay also marks, to some extent, a new departure in "Bennettian" criticism. By concentrating on the major Five Towns novels, and more or less ignoring what could only be of ephemeral value, Mr. Allen has shown how far passing years have already sorted out the grain from the chaff; he may indeed have hastened, by recognizing and sanctioning it, a process of selection and elimi- nation that had to take place before Arnold Bennett could definitely stake his claim to lasting recognition. It had long been obvious that the "traveller for immortality" would not be able to travel very far unless he abandoned part of his baggage by the wayside; but it remained uncertain how much, and which part of it, he could retain without jeopardizing his chances of reaching his goal. It cannot be said yet whether Arnold Bennett — assuming posterity preserves his name — will be remembered as the author of The Old Wives' Tale only, or of two or three books besides; but it now seems fairly certain among which of his works — half a dozen at most, and all of them novels, in the narrow sense — posterity's choice remains to be made. Perhaps the time has now come also to bring to the critical examination of his novels a slightly different method than has so far been applied to the task. During a writer's life-time, and for some years after his death, criticism of his work generally remains to a great extent a matter of personal opinions, an expression of the critic's likes and dislikes, halfway between journalistic reviewing and academic study. As the years go by, however, his claim to classical rank must, if maintained, be assessed on a more scientific, less subjective basis. At this point it becomes desirable to examine his sources, in order to reach a more exact estimate of his originality and gain a closer insight into the creative processes of his imagination. An attempt to do this for Arnold Bennett will be found in the follow-

3. Published by Frederick Muller (1939). 4. Imprimerie de l'Observateur, Avesnes-sur-Helpe (1941). 5. Published by Home & Van Thai (1948). 6. This was to be confirmed in the course of the next two decades, by the publication of a number of other books devoted to Bennett: Reginald Pound's biography (1952); Vittoria Sanna's Romanzi Delle Cinque Citta (1953); James Hall's Arnold Bennett, primitivism and taste (1959); J. G. Hepburn's Art of Arnold Bennett (1962). Angus Wilson's and John Wain's critical contributions (1954 and 1957 respectively) should also be mentioned in this connexion; and to the list, the present writer may be permitted to add his own Arnold Bennett et ses romans réalistes which, though submitted as a main thesis for the doctorate of literature as early as 1949, was not to appear in print until 1967. A fuller bibliography will be found at the end of this volume. ing studies, containing an account, mainly factual, of what is known today of the raw materials used by the writer in twelve of his twenty six novels. Contrary to general academic usage, the word "sources" should be understood here in its broadest possible sense as covering, not only the matter already published that the novelist has occasionally borrowed and transformed to suit his artistic purpose, but also the material he has borrowed from life itself, from reality as personally experienced by him or known to him by hearsay. It was often dif- ficult, in his case, to draw a definite line between the former and the latter kind of sources; and any clear-cut distinction between them was bound to appear highly artificial. Why, for instance, include historical data gathered from a book on the Siege of Paris, and discard memories of a conversation with personal witnesses of the Siege ? The argument, sometimes adduced in support of the usual definition of what is meant by a literary source, that docu- mentation is deliberate in the one case, casual and haphazard in the other, cannot be maintained; for the reverse may well happen. From the day when Arnold Bennett decided to become a writer, he probably never looked at an interesting scene or listened to an interesting conversation without the idea lurking at the back of his mind that the present experience might some day be useful to him. His Journals, occasionally supplemented by note-books reserved for jottings on one particular subject, or one particular aspect of his craft, were the reservoir in which his observations from real life could be stored until the moment came to use them. Were such observations deliberate, or casual ? Conversely, a writer may well make use of facts or ideas gathered from books read for mere pleasure, in the most unprofessional, disinterested frame of mind. Another reason why it seemed advisable, in the present instance, to broaden from the start the usual definition of a literary source is that Arnold Bennett never was, for a writer, a widely-read man. He himself acknowledged, with a complacency that sometimes verged on boastfulness, the wide gaps which the brevity of his school career had left in his education; and some of those gaps were never filled. Even with regard to French literature, of which he was prone to speak and write with the assurance of an oracle, one may wonder if he was not intimate with a few well-chosen masterpieces (all from the nineteenth century) rather than really well-read. As to the hun- dreds of books he reviewed in the course of his career as a jour- nalist and a critic, they were often merely glanced at, or skipped through, before being judged or commented upon, as it were, from a distance. In the circumstances, the source-hunter could not limit the field of his research to Arnold Bennett's "bookish" sources without running the risk of reducing the scope and interest of any conclusions that might be drawn from his inquiry. It is hoped that comparison of the raw material — whenever it could be identified — with the finished product will throw some light on Arnold Bennett's creative processes, both on his conscious technical methods and on the subconscious workings of his imagination. But at all events, a disquisition such as fills the following pages is best approached and conducted in a spirit of humility. One may indeed occasionally succeed in tracing the plot of a novel back to a previous writer's work, or an incident to some personal memory of the author's, or one of his characters to some acquaintance of his; and such discoveries may occasionally invite and lead to fruitful comparisons. Yet in the case of the great majority of writers, only a small proportion of their total output can thus be traced back to its origins in life or literature; the bulk of it must, in the present rudimentary state of psychological science, remain unaccounted for, because it is of the very stuff their dreams were made of — drawn, in a hitherto unexplained way, from the wealth of facts, feelings and thoughts, accumulated from infancy or even earlier, which con- stitutes a man's total experience. Only in very exceptional cases can the student of sources hope to discover, deep in the recesses of an artist's creative imagination, the germ of an idea or situation or incident of which the artist could honestly claim that "it just oc- curred" to him. Most of the time, the critic must be content with uncovering deliberately covered tracks, unravelling tangled threads, revealing and estimating debts about which the debtor preferred to keep silent. On the whole, if he is to avoid disappointment, he will be well advised to set narrow limits to his ambition, be satisfied with "finds" not at all commensurate with the time and effort devoted to research, and find solace in the thought that even his fruitless investigations, in so far as they tend to establish the originality of the author concerned, have not been in vain. The sources of Arnold Bennett's novels have already received in the past a certain amount of critical attention, and the present writer wishes to pay homage to previous searchers in the same field. He must, in particular, acknowledge his debt to Dr. Ruth Jäschke's Arnold Bennett und Frankreich 7, to the late Professor Lafourcade's study of The Sources of The Old Wives' Tale 8, and to Dr. M. M. Locherbie-Goff's Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett9, which has been of great help in determining the autobiographical elements in Bennett's novels. The discoveries of these previous searchers are duly ascribed to them in the following pages, their conclusions examined and occasionally challenged. They are supplemented by the results of research pursued by the writer himself over a number of years, so that the present volume, if it cannot claim complete originality, is nevertheless the first attempt at an overall survey of what is known, so far, of Arnold Bennett's sources. It is hoped that it will be of help to those who may later enter the same field and carry investigations further. It will, at least, give them guidance as to the general lie of the land; it will spare them a waste of time and effort in regions already prospected, and its

7. Paul Plischke, Breslau, 1934. 8. Originally published in The London Mercury, February 1937, pp. 391-99; reprinted as an appendix to Arnold Bennett, a study (Frederick Muller, 1939). 9. See p. 8 above. very lacunae may suggest unexplored paths of inquiry. That discoveries are still waiting to be made cannot be doubted—some to reward patient investigation, others to be just stumbled on by the casual passer-by. But they are not likely to be of such a sensational nature as to invalidate the conclusions already reached by criticism, or to call for a complete reassessment of a writer whose ultimate place in literary history will depend not so much on the judgments of critics as on the interest, so far unpredictable, that the common reader of to-morrow will find in his fiction. January 1949

CHAPTER I

THE SOURCES OF A MAN FROM THE NORTH

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS

As is often the case with first novels, A Man from the North owes more to memory than to imagination. The general outline of the story — that of a youth who breaks away from his native Pot- teries and comes to London in the hope of achieving his literary ambitions — provides an obvious and close parallel to the author's own early years; and this may well have prompted him, at a time when he still distrusted his creative powers, often to resort to autobiography in detailed incident also. Whatever the explanation, there are more unquestionably personal elements in this first novel than in any of those that were to follow, whether they belong to the Five Towns or to the London cycle of stories 1; and the largely autobiographical nature of A Man from the North is clearly acknowledged in The Truth about an Author where, writing under the cover of anonymity, Bennett tells of his earliest attempt at fiction. His first step was to decide on the purely technical — or, as he says, "physical" — characteristics of his book. Then, all these cardinal points being settled, I passed to the business of choosing a subject. Need I say that I chose myself ? ... I decided that my hero should go through most of my own experiences. 2 Of the author's experiences before he left the Potteries, there is little in the book, which starts from Richard Larch's arrival in London, and is characteristically presented as the story of a man from, not of the North. Apart from the brief retrospective account

1. As Dr. Locherbie-Goff rightly remarks in her Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett (p. 146), A Man from the North is really more helpful to Bennett's biographer than the professed (though originally anonymous) autobiography, of The Truth about an Author, where the writer occasionally embroiders on "the truth" and where, at a few years' distance, he treats a "period of constant disappointment with an impassive and sometimes cynical airiness". 2. The Truth about an Author, pp. 91-92. — to which we shall presently return — of Richard Larch's provincial childhood and adolescence (in Chapter IV) and from his journey home to attend his brother-in-law's funeral (Chapter VIII), the Five Towns hardly come into it. But it is not only in those two chapters that Bennett introduces memories of his early life in the Potteries. Chapter XV, for instance, which tells us of Adeline Aked's past life and is not set in the Five Towns — it has, indeed, no precise geo- graphical or topographical setting, and "hangs in the air" in most un- Bennett-like fashion — is nevertheless based and very closely modelled on the experiences of Emily Bennett, the novelist's second sister, during the years she spent in Burslem with her maternal grandparents, Robert Longson and his blind wife3. They kept the draper's shop, at the lower end of St. John's Square, which was later to become famous as Baines's in The Old Wives' Tale, and their grandson Enoch Arnold would occasionally stay with them too4. Anyone familiar with Robert Longson's establishment, the greater part of which still stands at the corner of St. John's Square and which, except for its social decline, has undergone little change in the past three-quarters of a century, will easily recognize it in the following description, a first sketch of what was, a few years later, to become Baines's. Adeline slept alone at the top of the house, and when she arose in the morning, ... she always ran to the window, Immediately below her were the leads which roofed the great projecting windows of the shop 5. The square never failed to interest her in the morning. In the afternoon it seemed torpid and morose; but before dinner, ... it was gaily alert — full of canvas-covered stalls, and horses and carts, and heaped piles of vegetables, and pigs grunting amidst straw ... 6 To her the house appeared to be of immense proportions. She had been told that once, before she was born, it was three houses 7. Certainly it possessed more than the usual number of staircases, and one of these, with the single room to which it gave access, was always closed. From the Square, the window of the disused chamber, obscured and bare, contrasted strangely with the clear panes, white blinds and red pads of the others. This room was next to her own, the two staircases

3. It is a small yet noteworthy point that Adeline's grandmother, in the novel, is blind too. 4. He seems never to have actually lived there, though he made fairly long visits. Mrs. Locherbie-Goff mentions one in 1876, another in 1880, the year of the Sunday Schools Centenary (La Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett, pp. 45-46) — Mrs. Vernon (Emily Bennett) writes: "I lived with Grandma and Auntie Longson (Frances Edna) at that Burslem shop through all my childhood, from 3 years of age ... until I was 16.... When Arnold went there and when he left there I cannot remember" (Private unpublished letter, dated 20 September 1933). 5. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 5: "It was a composite building of three storeys ... with a projecting shop front"; also Clayhanger, p. 237: "The leads over the projecting windows of Baines's ... were crowded with members of the ruling caste".... 6. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 51: "All over the Square, little stalls with yellow linen roofs were being erected.... In those barbaric days, vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs and pikelets were still sold under canvas". 7. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 4: "To make [the Baines's shop] three dwellings had at intervals been thrown into one". running parallel; and the thought of its dread emptiness awed her at nights....8 Beneath the house were many cellars. One served for kitchens, and Adeline had a swing there, hung from a beam; two others were larders; a fourth held coal, and in a fifth ashes were thrown. There were yet two more under the shop 10 ... Often, chattering to the shop girls, who at quiet times of the day clustered round the stove with their sewing 11, she would suddenly think of the cellars below, and her heart would seem to stop.... The show room on the first floor had two large, unobstructed windows.... Adeline employed it on week days as a nursery ... ; there was a cheval glass 12 ... in which she contemplated herself long and seriously.13 To lovers of The Old Wives' Tale, this house is sure to seem strangely familiar. They will know the window against which Con- stance and Sophia Baines, in their early teens, pressed their noses, making fun of Maggie as she crossed the Square in her Sunday best14. They will know the dirty window of the mysterious top floor room is, the underground kitchen where Maggie and Amy slaved is, the coal cellar where Sam Povey once retrieved his son Cyril, aged four 17, the shop girls who witnessed the fateful visit of Gerald Scales 18, the show room cheval-glass at which Sophia Baines used to preen herself 19. This setting Bennett has reconstituted from his own childhood memories, probably supplemented and coloured, according to Mrs. Vernon20, by her early confidences: the "feel" of the place, its atmosphere of disquieting mystery, certainly suggest, even more than a young boy's impressions, those of a little girl of more than average imagination and sensitiveness.

8. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 5: "On the sash of each window was a red cloth roll stuffed with sawdust to prevent draughts; plain white blinds descended about six inches from the top of each window ... [A] window on the second storey was peculiar in that it had neither blind nor pad, and was very dirty; this was the window of an unused room that had a separate staircase to itself, the staircase being barred by a door always locked. Constance and Sophia had lived in continual expectation of the abnormal issuing from that mysterious room, which was next to their own". 9. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, pp. 6-7: "Maggie, domestic servant at Baines's, ... lived seventeen hours of each day in an underground kitchen and larder". 10. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 185: "Samuel Povey came into the kitchen by the underground passage which led past the two cellars to the yard. He was carrying ... an obscene black mass. This mass was Cyril, once white". 11. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 97: "Three young lady assistants ... sat sewing round the stove in the middle of the shop". 12. Comp. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 6: "The showroom was over the millinery and silken half of the shop ... [It was] a large apartment ... [with] a magnificent hinged cheval-glass". 13. A Man from the North, pp. 129-134 passim. 14. The Old Wives' Tale, p. 6. 15. Ibid., p. 6. 16. Ibid., pp. 7, 481, et passim. 17. Ibid., p. 185. 18. Ibid., pp. 68-73. 19. Ibid., p. 69. 20. In a conversation with the present writer. Another item of family history that lies embedded in A Man from the North is the marriage of Sarah Bennett, the novelist's aunt, with Samuel Barlow, plumber and organist. After becoming engaged, the pair had quarrelled; and though they were close neighbours, they never said a word to each other for twelve years — at the end of which they made it up, married, and lived happily together 21. This inspired the story of Mary Larch — Richard's elder sister — and William Vernon, of their love, quarrel and reconciliation in middle age, after they had been separated for "fifteen irretrievable years ... [by] some ridiculous misunderstanding" 22, The little we are told in the novel of Richard Larch's provincial early life is partly borrowed from Bennett's own. Like Bennett at Burslem, Larch, we are told, led at Bursley a rather narrow and solitary existence; reading was his chief pleasure, book-buying the only luxury he could indulge in. He ordered magazines whose very names Mr. Holt, the principal bookseller in Bursley, was unfamiliar with, and after the magazines came books of verse and novels enclosed in covers of mystic design.... Mr. Holt's shop performed the functions of a club for the dignitaries of the town; and since he took care that this esoteric literature was well displayed ... the young man's fame as a great reader soon spread. 23 Bennett, as he wrote those lines, was most probably thinking of Joseph Dawson, who had been, and still was in the nineties, the "principal bookseller" in Burslem, but who, far from looking upon his young customer's literary tastes as eccentric, had often guided his reading, had introduced him to contemporary French naturalism, and had made it possible for him to read — unknown to his father, of course — Vizetelly's early translations of Zola 24. Yet, despite their escapes into literature, both young Bennett and young Larch had found life dull and suffocating in their provincial town, and Larch, like Bennett before him, strongly felt the lure of the capital "where newspapers are issued, books written and plays performed" 25. As soon as he dared, he left the solicitor's office where he had been employed as a shorthand and general clerk — like young Bennett in his father's office — and went to London where he had obtained a post with Messrs. Curpet & Smythe at a salary of twenty- five shillings a week — exactly what Bennett, when he first came to London, received from Messrs. Le Brasseur & Oakley. There can be little question that the firm of Le Brasseur & Oakley was the original for that of Curpet & Smythe, whose office is in New Serjeant's

21. The Making of Me, by Arnold Bennett (Daily Express, 6 June 1928, p. 10f.). 22. A Man from the North, p. 18. 23. Ibid., p. 19. 24. On Joseph Dawson and his friendship with Bennett, see M. Locherbie- Goff, La Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett, pp. 86-88. On his indirect contribution to Clayhanger, see pp. 126-7 of the present volume. 25. A Man from the North, p. 2. Court. This, as described in the novel 26, can easily be identified as New Court, which remained, up to the Second World War at least, very much as it had been in 1889, when the future novelist first took up his duties there. in the office of Le Brasseur & Oakley 27. Even the partners in the imaginary firm can be identified : that Le Brasseur was the original Curpet, and Oakley the original Smythe is made clear when we compare Curpet's and Smythe's appearance and behaviour, as described in the novel28, with what Mr. Arthur Coveney, who was Bennett's colleague in the office of Le Brasseur & Oakley, writes of his former employers :

Robert Le Brasseur, one of the members of the firm, was a man with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard29. Tom ... Oakley was the other member of the firm, and Bennett was his shorthand clerk and wrote up the bills of costs against the clients ... 30 Oakley ... greatly amused Bennett on account of letters he used to write after having lunched well. [He] used to rush a great deal31, acting like a bull in a China shop. 32 What is true of the principals applies also to several of the clerks, who were Bennett's own colleagues before they became his hero's: the Jenkins of the novel, a typical young Cockney, was in real life called Spark or Sparks 33; the imaginary Mr. Aked owes many traits of his character, notably his passion for books, to a real Mr. John Eland, of whom Mr. Coveney says, in the letter from which we have already quoted :

He was also a shorthand clerk in Le Brasseur & Oakley's office while Bennett and I were there. He was a great friend of Bennett's, and Bennett told me, when he met me a few years before he died34, that he owed a great deal of his success to the advice about books which he had obtained from Eland 35 ... Eland was probably three or four years older than Bennett36.

26. Ibid., pp. 21-22. 27. The office of Le Brasseur & Oakley, now at 40 Carey Street, W.C.2, was then at 12A New Court, behind the Law Courts. 28. See in particular pp. 25-28. 29. Comp. A Man from the North, p. 27: "Mr. Curpet was a small man with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard". 30. Similarly, Larch is employed by Curpet & Smythe as a shorthand and costing clerk. 31. Comp. Smythe's "fidgetiness" (A Man from the North, p. 25). 32. Unpublished letter to the present writer, dated 29th October, 1937. 33. We have Bennett's own word for this, in his Journals (12 May 1916, American edition only): "Coveney told me that Sparks, whom I put in A Man from the North as Albert Jenkins, was now a middle-aged man, and apparently very able". Mr. Coveney confirms this in the letter already mentioned, where he writes, however, of Spark, not Sparks. 34. In fact, on 12 May 1916, according to Bennett's Journals. 35. Comp. Arnold Bennett's Letters to his Nephew, p. 149 (29 Sep. 1925): "When I first came to London ... I had no relations whatever, and could not get any for a long time, except one clerk at the office, a fellow named Eland, who had a passion for bibliography which meant a great deal to me". Compare The Truth about an Author: "Another clerk in the office happened to be an ardent bibliophile. We became friends and I owed him much. He would chatter in idiomatic French like a house on fire, and knew his British Museum from its centre to its periphery ... I had scarcely been in London a year when my friend and I decided to collaborate in a bibliographical dictionary of For some time after Bennett's arrival in London, John Eland seems not only to have been his only friend 37, but to have stood in very much the same relationship to him as Mr. Aked to Richard Larch, relieving the "utter solitude in London" 38 which Bennett had no doubt experienced before he analysed its demoralizing effects on Richard. Both the novelist and his hero try the same distractions: reading French novels, playing the piano, collecting books 39. Literary ambition is common to both; so are the obstacles which this ambition encounters; and the difficulties which Richard Larch finds in writing, and which finally defeat him, are closely reminiscent of those to which Bennett confesses in a letter to George Sturt dated 11 November 1895 40. The principles of literary composition which Mr. Aked teaches Richard — the need for "unremitting drudgery" for instance 41, or the uselessness of passively waiting for inspira- tion 42, or the beauty to be found in commonplace facts or surround- ings 43 — are obviously Bennett's own, to such an extent that they amount to a fairly complete and reliable statement of his artistic creed. The name of The Trifler — the periodical to which Larch sends his essay on Lichfield — is but a thin disguise for Tit-Bits, which printed some of Bennett's earliest works 44. The story of Tiddy-fol-lol, which Larch vainly tries to write, is one that Bennett was to write a few years later 45, following very closely the outline he had given of it in A Man from the North. Comparison of Richard Larch's character with Bennett's own personality reveals similarities no less striking than does that of their respective experiences in early life. The novelist is easily recog- nized in his "fundamentally irreligious" 46 young hero who, when still in Bursley, succeeded in emancipating himself from Sunday School though not from Sunday service, and whose very irregular church-going, once he came to London, "proceeded from a craving,

rare and expensive books in all European languages.... The mere conception of this dictionary was so splendid that there was a grandeur even in dropping it" (pp. 44 sqq.). 36. Mr. Aked, in the novel, is much older than Richard Larch. He had to be, if his life was to appear as a consummate failure and to foreshadow the "disillusion and desolating suburban domesticity" (The Truth about an Author, p. 92) that fate had in store for his young friend Larch. 37. See note 35 above. 38. A Man from the North, p. 46. 39. A Man from the North, pp. 54 and 56. 40. See p. 20 of this volume. Also The Truth about an Author, p. 64: "Every night I laboured dully and obstinately, excogitating, inventing, grinding out ... ". Ibid. p. 92: "I knew what I wanted to do, and I could not do it. I felt, but I could not express". 41. A Man from the North, p. 53. 42. Ibid., p. 80. 43. Ibid., p. 102. In The Roll-Call and Riceyman Steps, Bennett will do, for some of the drabbest parts of London, what Mr. Aked had dreamt of doing in his never-written Psychology of the Suburbs. 44. Notably his condensation of Grant Allen's What's bred in the bone (Tit- Bits, 19 December 1891) and his short story The Artist's Model (Tit-Bits, 6 May 1893). 45. It is one of the Tales of the Five Towns (1905). 46. A Man from the North, p. 91. purely sensuous, which sought gratification in ceremonial pomps, twilight atmospheres ... and dim perspectives of arching stone" 46. Larch, like Bennett, is somewhat insensitive to the beauty of the countryside 47; like him too, he pays "particular attention to his dress, enjoying the sensation of wearing good clothes" 48. But their psychological kinship is most striking in their common attitude to women and love. A puritanical upbringing seems to have stimu- lated rather than crushed their sensual aspirations. As late as 1908, Bennett confesses, in his Journals, that in spite of his "intellectual scorn for all sexual physical manifestations", he remains at the age of 41, after his fifteen years' bachelorhood in two capitals, "perver- sely curious and adventurous ... in just those manifestations" 49. As to Larch, he typically spends his first evening in London at the Ottoman Theatre of Varieties, whose name was, in Bursley, " a syno- nym for all the glittering vices of the metropolis" 5°; late that night, back in his room, he still thinks of the woman who, as he passed by her table in the promenade, "twittered a phrase ending in chéri" 51. An momentary glimpse of a young mother's breast is enough to launch his imagination into sensual day-dreaming 52; one reason why he hesitates to propose to Adeline Aked is that she might well prove "painfully orthodox as to the sexual relations" 53; what attracts him, on the other hand, to Laura Roberts is her fair complexion and "maddening bosom" 54. Yet this man of rather more than average sensuality is a poor lover. His heart is paralysed by self-examination and self-control. As soon as feeling is born, common sense intervenes to approve or disapprove of it, to plan and direct the course of its development, and to keep it in check, with the result that its impetus is broken and it cannot rise to the heights of full-blooded passion. In his painful solitude, the young clerk yearns for a great love, assiduously cherishing the slightest incipient symptoms of it. But his reason, by forbidding unself- conscious laisser-aller, condemns him to sentimental frustration; on the eve of his marriage to Laura, "one part of him was willingly enslaved to an imperious passion; the other stood calmly, cynically apart, and watched" 55. This duplication of personality Bennett was to call elsewhere 56 "the novelist's disease", though it is not confined to members of that profession, and is probably less "occupational" in origin than connected with a strict and repressive moral upbringing. That Bennett himself was a sufferer from it no one will deny;

47. Ibid., pp. 92-93. 48. Ibid., p. 223. 49. Journals, 25 May 1908. On Bennett's attitude to women and sex, see the present writer s Arnold Bennett et ses romans réalistes, pp. 60-61 et passim. 50. A Man from the North, p. 9. 51. Ibid., p. 13. 52. Ibid., pp. 60-61. 53. Ibid., p. 124. 54. Ibid., p. 259. 55. Ibid., p. 258. 56. Sacred and Profane Love, p. 131. and the testimonies of the women who shared his life are in complete agreement on this point. On one important point, however, Larch differs from his creator. He entirely lacks the grit and determination which Bennett shows in finishing A Man from the North, in spite of the tremendous effort it demands. In his letter to George Sturt on 11 November 1895, the aspiring novelist confesses: "I find a novel the damnedest nerve shattering experience as ever was. Nothing but my strong aversion to being beaten by anything on God's earth that I set myself to whip prevents me from throwing up the present one" 57. The diffi- culty which stimulates him like a challenge proves an impassable barrier in the way of Larch's ambitions — as it had to be if, in obedience to fashionable pessimism, Larch was to "arrive ulti- mately at disillusion and a desolating suburban domesticity" 58. It is by no means certain that in choosing lack of will-power as Larch's fatal weakness, Bennett remembered Frederic Moreau's "defaut de ligne droite" in L'Education Sentimentale59. This, however, is the main contrast between the novelist and his hero — the point where their characters differ and where their careers diverge. Larch strongly resembles Bennett; and yet he is, at the same time, the very type of human failure that Bennett refused to be.

II. THE INFLUENCE OF BEL-AMI

In his exhilaration at having finished A Man from the North, Bennett humorously described himself as "the latest disciple of the Goncourts" 6°, and the fastidious care he had devoted to the mere writing of it bore sufficient witness to the reality of this discipleship. His cult for the other leaders of the French naturalistic school was, however, scarcely less fervent than his admiration for the champions of l'écriture artiste. Maupassant certainly stood very high in his esteem, and Bennett names him among the writers under whose "sweet influences" he sat down to write his first novel61. At that time — to quote from the Preface to The Old Wives' Tale — he "used to regard Une Vie with mute awe as being the summit of achievement in fiction" 62; with Bel-Ami he was so intimately familiar as to mistake his memories of it for the products of his own imagination. It was only on re-reading Bel-Ami in 1903 that he noticed how

57. The Five Hundred Best English Letters, collected by F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, p. 904. 58. The Truth about an Author, p. 92. 59. The suggestion is put forward by Mrs. M. Locherbie-Goff on p. 162 of her Jeunesse d'Arnold Bennett. 60. Journals, 28 May 1896. 61. The Truth about an Author, p. 88. 62. The Old Wives' Tale, Preface, p. 7. similar it was, on a number of points, to his own narrative of Richard Larch's youth. He remarked quite candidly in his Journals on that occasion: "People might easily say that in A Man from the North I had plagiarized from [Bel-Ami ...] But I am not conscious, now, of having imitated" 63. There is no reason why we should not take his word for it : he never hesitated, when the need appeared, carefully to conceal the sources from which he had drawn, or slyly to entice his critics along the wrong track. In the present instance, nothing would have been easier than to keep his belated "discovery" to himself. That he mentioned it in a Journal obviously intended for publication indicates that his conscience was clear, and that his borrowings had been unintentional. The general themes of the two stories are somewhat similar, and here again, as with autobiographical data64, it may have been this general similarity that led Bennett unwittingly to imitate inci- dents or details. Both novels are concerned with the adventures of a young provincial, rather lost in the capital at first, trying to make a name for himself through journalism and literature; but whereas the Frenchman succeeds, thanks to his ready tongue, his assurance, his luck, and his lack of scruples, the Englishman's lack of will- power makes him the easy victim of a hostile fate. Women play an equally important part in both lives; but whereas they are to Duroy, the flashy man-about-town, a further means of achieving his ambitions, they are one more cause of failure to Larch, whose inborn sensuality is at strife with a puritanical upbringing. When the narrative of their decisive years begins, we find them both in the midst of the nocturnal pleasures of the capital; Larch goes to the Ottoman Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, in the same way as Duroy, before him, had visited the Folies-Bergère; and Bennett, following Maupassant's example, devotes only one sen- tence to the high illuminated facade of the theatre. The two interiors are described in greater detail, and a comparison of them affords more conclusive evidence of Maupassant's influence :

Une vapeur de tabac voilait un The smoke of a thousand cigar- peu comme un très fin brouillard, ettes enveloped the furthest parts les parties lointaines, la scene et of the great interior in a thin 1'autre cot£ du theatre. Et s'£levant bluish haze, which was dissipated sans cesse ... de toutes les ciga- as it reached the domed ceiling in rettes que fumaient tous ces gens, the rays of a crystal chandelier. cette brume légère ... formait sous le large d6me, autour du lus- tre, ... un ciel ennuagé de fumée. Dans le vaste corridor d'entrde The broad semi-circular prom- qui mene à la promenade circulaire enade which flanked the seats of ou rode la tribu parée des filles, the grand circle was filled with a

63. Journals, 15 November 1903. 64. See pp. 13-20 above.