Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 16

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Etruria, the country of the Etruscans in Italy, was, I suppose, a very different place from Etruria, the small town between Hanley and Burslem ("Hanbridge" and "Bursley") where Josiah Wedgwood founded his pottery in the eighteenth century, but the spirit which produced the Etruscan ceramics was not dissimilar from the spirit which produces the famous Wedgwood ware; and I thought to myself as I looked at the romantic name of that grimy-looking town in Staffordshire that I had stumbled on the secret of Mr. Bennett. Underneath the plain appearance of the pottery town, there is a spirit which has persisted in the production of beautiful things for the best part of two centuries, a spirit so much in love with delicate ware that it calls an unsightly town by the name of an ancient and reputedly beautiful one; and underneath the hard and fact-ridden style of Mr. Bennett there is an ineradicable desire for romance. I said of him once that he fights the battles of the romantic with the weapons of the realist, and that description seems to me to be strictly accurate. Mr. Bennett mingles, even in his Christian names, the gritty and the graceful in a way that is singularly characteristic of the people of his district. "Enoch Arnold Bennett" is a combination of names not easily imagined, but it is not more unusual than the combination of Etruria and Staffordshire, of lovely ceramics and "the Five Towns." Mr. Bennett has many times been charged with addiction to dusty realism, a dull love of facts. His critics say of him, after reading such a book as "Your United States," that he must have spent his time on the liner in which he went to America in counting the rivets in her plates for the sheer love of counting them, and they conclude that he is a materialist because of his interest in numbers and in things. They even complain of him that he is infatuated with largeness, just as Queen Victoria was, and that he imagines a thing to be good when it is merely big. This is undiscerning criticism. It is as if a child were charged with being a disciple of Haeckel because it thinks that ten things are more wonderful than one thing. We may think that Mr. Bennett is a fact-ridden modern, incapable of romance, because he inordinately admires electricity, but to do so is to announce ourselves as dunderheads for not discovering that his love of electricity is the Romantic's love of the Magic Lamp! How easily most of us are dissuaded from our faith in romantic things! We are in ecstasies when we hear of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the fishes and the birds and addressing them as little brothers, but we are horribly shocked and humiliated when Mr. Bernard Shaw makes the mad priest in "John Bull's Other Island" speak of a pig as our little brother! There is prettiness in the community of men and birds, even of men and the smaller fish, but pigs—PORK!! We find romance in the spectacle of a man rubbing a dirty lantern with his fingers in order to summon up a serving genie, but cannot perceive the greater romance found by Mr. Bennett in the spectacle of a man pressing a switch and illuminating a room with power drawn by wires from a station many miles away! We are enchanted with the thought of transport on Magic Carpets, but unmoved by the thought that presently great ships will be guided into New York Harbour, not by pilots, but by means of wireless telegraphy! Some dullards have exclaimed despairingly of Mr. Bennett because of what they called his trivial and commonplace interests as revealed in that enthralling book, "Things That Have Interested Me," failing utterly to discern that it is his interest in these things which is so infallible a sign of his zest for life. Any one can be interested in the Rocky Mountains, but it is only a superbly romantic man who can be absorbed in Tarrytown. There is not anything in the round world, made by God or by man, which does not interest Mr. Bennett. Familiarity breeds contempt in most of us, but it does not breed contempt in him. He never gets used to things. Most of us are too dull of mind, too destitute of imagination to feel interest or astonishment unless we are abruptly confronted with the unusual or the violent, and our capacity for romantic enjoyment is limited and soon exhausted. We would exclaim with astonishment on beholding an eruption of Mount Vesuvius for the first time, but we would exclaim rather less on perceiving the ninety-ninth eruption. Mr. Bennett would experience as much excitement on the ninety-ninth occasion as he would on the first. Nothing less than an earthquake is necessary to stir some of us, but Mr. Bennett can be stirred by the sight of a taxicab. The genesis of "The Old Wives' Tale," as described in the preface to one of the later editions, is a clear illustration of his romantic possession:

In the autumn of 1903 [he writes], I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged, managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that "French beans were a subject which I did not understand...."

I break the quotation here to exclaim at the obtuseness of that Breton woman who, in the course of her management of Mr. Bennett, failed to discover that he loves to regard himself as an authority on such matters as French beans. There is a kind of romantic pride which makes some men believe that they know the one place in a city where the best brand of a particular article is to be purchased. Mr. Bennett has that pride. The heaviness of the Breton's blow to it can be imagined after reading the next sentence in the passage from which I am making the quotation:

I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken. I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she. Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque—far from it!—but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout, ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout, ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos. It was at that instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." ...