Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 17

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In that passage there is revealed much, I think, of Mr. Bennett's character and spirit. He dislikes the sensation of being managed because he likes the sensation of managing. The Breton woman could have won him to faithful service for ever if she had deferred to him in the matter of French beans, and who knows what tricks of duplicity she could have played upon him had she stooped to guile? But she wounded him in his pride when she bluntly told him that her judgment on beans was sounder than his, and thus lost the custom of the most interesting of her diners. The first fact, therefore, that one discovers in this passage is that Mr. Bennett has a profound respect for his own opinion: he feels pretty sure of himself. This may be considered to be a sign of conceit, but that consideration is not necessarily true. It could only be a sign of conceit if Mr. Bennett's respect for his own opinion were misplaced, and there is nothing in his record to show that it is misplaced. There is, on the contrary, much to show that it is placed with the utmost propriety. He has done many of the things which he said he would do, and has done them exceedingly well. If all of us could have faith in ourselves with as much justification as Mr. Bennett has faith in himself, we would do well to practice our faith with fervour. The second fact about Mr. Bennett which is revealed by this passage is the romantic nature of him, but before I discuss it, I wish to point out a third and minor fact which is something of a flaw in him, not an important flaw, but one which must be remembered by his admirers. It is his occasional tendency to let his romanticism degenerate into sentimentality. Observe how he seems to have romanced about the pale and beautiful waitress to whom he never spoke, how he assumes that because she is beautiful she must also be generous and sympathetic and kindly, with what dismay he discovers that, just as a man can smile and smile and be a villain, so a woman can be pale and beautiful, and yet be as cruel or lacking in perception as the ruddiest and least lovely of her sex. He declares, indeed, that he quitted the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy because of the insolence of the Breton woman who disputed his authority on beans, but may he not be deceiving himself, may he not in fact have quitted that place because his illusion about the beautiful, pale young waitress was shattered by her coarse grimaces, her unkindly giggles? After all, it is easy enough to live with those who will not accept our estimate of ourselves, but how hard it is to live with lost beliefs. One of the most painful things about shell-shock cases resulting in mental derangement is that the patient seems to loathe most those whom he formerly loved most, and here in England many of us know of pitiful women who dare not go to see their unbalanced husbands because the mere sight of them throws the unhappy men into paroxysms of rage and anguish!...

But it is when we come to consider Mr. Bennett's attitude towards the foolish old woman who changed her seat and dropped her parcels so often in the restaurant in the Rue de Clichy that we discover his chief characteristic. If he were the fact-ridden realist that some of his critics pronounce him to be, he could not possibly have perceived in that old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque," the lineaments of a girl, "young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms." A fact-ridden realist might not have joined in the laughter of the Breton woman and the giggling pale waitress, but he would have judged the old woman with harsh contempt, more intolerable even than mocking laughter, and he would have turned away from her in irritation and disgust because of her inefficiency, her clumsiness, her indecision, her displeasing exterior. At best, he would have seen her solely as a fat, ugly and grotesque person who had always been incompetent, fat, ugly and grotesque. But Mr. Bennett, incorrigibly romantic, regarding her closely and with kindliness, insists that beneath the bulk of her body there is a soul, that the too, too solid flesh once wore "the feature of blown youth," even as Ophelia found it in Hamlet! She may not be beautiful now, he tells himself, but how beautiful may she not once have been. That is the spirit of romance. It is a certain sign of the romantic in a man that he will not permit himself to be bluffed by appearances when appearances are bad, although he may often be bluffed by them when they are good. Mr. Bennett was not deceived by the old woman's looks, but he was terribly deceived by the looks of the pale, young waitress, and it is true of him, I think, that he is very easily deceived by youth, to which he is uncommonly generous. Observe how he shows his willingness to be deceived by youth in the passage which I have quoted. He tells himself that the old woman was once "young, slim, perhaps beautiful," which is likely enough, but he goes on, not romantically, but sentimentally, to add, that she was "certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms." Now, there is no warrant in human experience for such an assumption. I am prepared to believe that an old woman, "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque" was once "slim, perhaps beautiful," but I am not prepared to believe that an indecisive, footling old woman was, in her girlhood, any other than indecisive and footling. We do not change our natures to that extent as we grow older unless we lose our wits or suffer gravely in health, and the tragedy of old age is that habits and mannerisms which are charming and attractive in youth are merely silly and annoying in age. We are amused by the violent opinions of a clever young man of twenty, inclined even to applaud him for holding them because they are significant of an active and developing mind, but they are less amusing to us and win less applause if they are still being expressed by him when he is thirty. We cease altogether to applaud or be amused when we hear him still at them when he is forty. We no longer describe him as a clever young man, but a damned fool. No one has any right to be a clever young man all his life. The law should forbid any one to be a clever young man after the age of twenty-seven. The world is entitled to demand that its clever young men shall grow up and achieve some sort of sanity and right judgment by the age of thirty, and if they refuse to grow up, then they are not free to complain if the world revises its judgment on them and inexorably thrusts them from its regard. Mr. Bennett's old woman dropped her parcels and changed her seat just as frequently in her youth as she did on that evening when he saw her in the Rue de Clichy, but she was young and perhaps pretty then, and people forgave her for her footling ways because of her youthfulness and in the hope that someday she would acquire steadiness of character and control over her packages. I think I can give a fairly accurate description of that old woman when she was a girl. She was always late for everything, but her demure ways and a sort of foal-like clumsiness about her made men willing to wait and be gracious about it. She always remembered at the last moment nineteen different things which she had forgotten to do, which must immediately be done, which inevitably caused greater delay. She could never find her railway ticket when the inspector came round to examine it and frequently held up trains while every one in her carriage hunted high and low for it. She persistently dropped her gloves, her handkerchief and her vanity-bag or left them behind her wherever she went. She never went out of doors without losing something. She never had any small change, and invariably tendered a ten-dollar bill, when buying a ten-cent newspaper, in the fond belief that the clerk at the news stand or even the boy in the street was certain to have plenty of change and be all too eager to oblige her. She always got on to the wrong train or trolley-car and did not discover her mistake until too late to dismount from it!... But she succeeded in putting over that sort of fatuous behaviour on the strength of her youth and prettiness; and men, who would go raving mad if they had to live with a middle-aged or elderly woman of such habits, readily excused her imbecilities because they were those of youth.

I wondered often, when I was in America, why I saw so many old or middle-aged husbands with girl-wives. People told me that the cost of living is so high in America that young men cannot afford to marry young girls, but must either marry older and richer women or refrain from marriage until they are middle-aged. Young women, so I was told, must marry the elderly and the bald, the slack and the flabby because, otherwise, they cannot hope for a good time until they are no longer of an age to enjoy it. I do not much esteem young women who refuse the great adventure of marriage with young, poor men in order that they may have a good time with unenthusiastic, tamed and middle-aged men, especially when I remember that a good time in such circumstances means only a fatly comfortable one, being well-fed, well-housed and well-clothed without ever having had the fun of fighting for such comforts. But I am not entirely convinced by the arguments which were put to me in explanation of this singular and unnatural conjunction of the young and the middle-aged. There may be truth in the statement that American girls marry elderly men for the comfort they receive, but I doubt whether the elderly men marry for that reason. I am very certain that such marriages are made because the men are romantic and will not believe that the young girl's "charming ways" will not be retained by her when she is no longer young. The plain and undeniable fact is that elderly men marry girls because they cannot believe that a girl who has foolish habits will not cease to have them when she is older. The romantic is a man who is everlastingly hoping for the best, everlastingly striving to obtain the best. A romantic realist is a man who, while striving for the best, knows that he may only obtain the worst. The sentimentalist is a man who removes himself from the region of reality and refuses to admit that there is a worst, who insists that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Mr. Arnold Bennett is a romantic realist, with a slight tendency towards sentimentalism.