Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 15

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One night, some years before the outbreak of the European War, I arrived in the town of Hanley in the County of Stafford in the midlands of England to deliver a lecture on some subject, the name of which I do not now remember, although I suspect it was connected with the general improvement of mankind. I had accepted the invitation to lecture in Hanley, not because I had anything of importance to say to its inhabitants, but because I had lately read "The Old Wives' Tale" by Mr. Arnold Bennett, and was eager to see the place and the people from which that great book had sprung. My recollections of the visit are very vague now, but I remember that my host, a man of serious mind, a little over-weighted, perhaps, by the troubles of the universe, took me for a walk on Sunday morning through some of "the Five Towns," in the course of which he displayed much knowledge of the topography of Mr. Bennett's books without displaying much knowledge of the books themselves. He informed me that the real name of "Trafalgar Road" in "The Old Wives' Tale" is "Waterloo Road" and that the fictitious name of Hanley is "Hanbridge." He speculated incuriously on the oddness which had caused Mr. Bennett to alter real names in this palpable manner, and ended his discourse with the statement that he seldom read novels (which he persisted in calling "Works of Fiction") being more inclined to the study of serious books. I learned that he read chiefly in the writings of sociologists and political economists and similar serious persons. I suggested to him that he might more profitably read novels than sociological books if he wished to discover something about human character. He was a polite and kindly man, and he did not abruptly tell me of my folly, but I could see that he considered me to be a fool or, at best, a flippant person, and I am sure that had he not been my host he would not have troubled to attend my lecture that evening. He smiled in the benign way men have when they abstain from expressing their frank opinion, as he listened to me saying that he would find in novels a greater fund of information about human nature than he could hope to find in all the works that all the sociologists in the world have written. Men of affairs, I said, spend their lives in writing ponderous volumes on society which are out-of-date as soon as they are published, whereas the novel or the play of a man of genius remains true for ever. Henry Fielding and Adam Smith were contemporaries, but I imagine few will deny that there is more durable stuff, stuff more continuously applicable to human concerns, in "Tom Jones" than there is in "The Wealth of Nations." But my friend would have none of this, and seemed to think that any man who spent time in reading Fielding's novel which might be spent in reading Adam Smith was shamefully misusing his mind. He led me, I remember, through much of the territory which is generically known as "the Five Towns." I saw the Square in which the Baineses lived, and was told that although Mr. Bennett called it "St. Luke's Square" in "The Old Wives' Tale," the local authorities preferred to call it after St. John. So great was the influence of the novel upon me that when I peered through the window of the shop in which, so I was told, Constance and Sophia Baines were born, I almost expected to see the half-heroic figure of Samuel Povey behind the counter or to meet the cold, un-human glance of that frozen spinster, Miss Marie Insull, who once, and once only, displayed signs of human emotion—on the occasion when Mr. Critchlow brought her into the presence of the widowed Constance to announce his betrothal to her:

The dog had leisurely strolled forward to inspect the edges of the fiancé's trousers. Miss Insull summoned the animal with a noise of the fingers, and then bent down and caressed it. A strange gesture proving the validity of Charles Critchlow's discovery that in Maria Insull a human being was buried.

My host led me up stony streets, in which every sort of domestic architecture was visible—for "the Five Towns" are so independent that even in the workmen's houses there is no uniformity of style or harmony of design, a fact which makes, not for a pleasing diversity, but for shapelessness and incoherence—and pointed to places in the ground where, so he said, the earth had opened, owing to underground operations, and swallowed whosoever should happen to be passing over it. There was a story of a man who had set forth in the morning to go to his work, but, before he had travelled many yards from his home, was suddenly consumed by the opening earth and was never seen again. I will admit that I trod those streets thereafter with trepidation and considerable care! I had begun to tire of the ugly houses with their insufferable architecture, and of the grime caused by innumerable chimneys emitting thick, black smoke, when I was led up a steep street at the top of which I was told to halt and gaze about me. I saw the whole of "the Five Towns" and much of the surrounding country spread out like the kingdoms of the world and realized how strangely moving such a scene can be because of its suggestion of human presences. It was not without beauty, in spite of the gloom of an industrial area, but it impressed me most by its air of effort and power and achievement. I became conscious of the activities of men and women, of great labours, of confused strivings out of which some human need is satisfied, and I came away, as I always come away from such sights, immensely impressed by human organization and very satisfied with great machines. When we had descended from that high street and had walked elsewhere, I found myself suddenly confronting a railway station on which I saw the romantic name of ETRURIA.