according to individual capacities and desires.
Suburban uniformity could be regarded as benevolent, according to the Dickens view, or petty and destructive, according to the Ruskin view. The real challenge was to see in the suburbs something other than uniformity. Bennett rose to the challenge-perhaps not in A Man from the North, which is written according to the Ruskin view, but certainly in Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and The Card (1911). There is nothing very startling about Bennett's point that suburbia exists in the eye of the beholder. But it is symptomatic of a new emphasis in English fiction that he should choose to write about suburbs rather than slums, and that he should discover in his chosen territory no more than the faintest trace of monstrosity.
Most unusually for a novelist, Bennett was interested in the way people remain in ignorance of themselves, and in the way such ignorance creates an identity. This interest required a new kind of plot. Many, if -624- not most, plots-and certainly those favored by the great nineteenthcentury English novelists-turn on moments of revelation, when the illusions nurtured by timidity, prejudice, or habit fall away, and a naked self confronts a naked world. These are the moments when identity is begun, renewed, or completed. French naturalism had added a different plot, in which the revelation is gradual, and of something already known but temporarily concealed: a moral or physical flaw, an organic 'lesion.' Both kinds of plot favor awareness. Illusions are there to be stripped away. There can be no self-discovery, no personal development, whether into enlightenment or into degeneracy, until they have been stripped away.
A curious episode in The Old Wives' Tale (1908) suggests that Bennett was never really very happy with either kind of plot. Grouchy, fallible, cautiously opportunistic, waveringly tyrannical Samuel Povey is summoned from his bed one night by his more expansive cousin, Daniel, and transferred, in effect, to another novel. Daniel begins by confessing that his wife is an alcoholic, and so tears to pieces in a moment 'the veil of thirty years' weaving.' Hinting at even darker horrors, he leads Samuel through his shop and into the house behind, where his son, one leg broken by a fall, and his wife, whom he has murdered in a fit of rage, lie sprawled. The «vile» Mrs. Povey isn't merely drunken, and dead-she is an emblem of degeneracy.
The experience transforms Samuel. He regards Daniel as a martyr, a man goaded beyond endurance. 'Samuel, in his greying middle age, had inherited the eternal youth of the apostle.' His new conviction makes him, for the first time in his life, a public figure. He launches a campaign to vindicate Daniel and secure his release. During the campaign, which fails, he contracts pneumonia and dies. His death provokes the narrator into a startling display of mawkishness.
Bennett finds himself caught between two traditions, French naturalism (Mrs. Povey's degeneracy) and English moralism (Samuel's transformation), neither of which suits him at all. The whole episode seems like a lengthy quotation from a second-rate novel by someone else. One moment only sounds like Bennett. On the night of the murder, halfway through an anguished debate with Samuel, Daniel meticulously empties the surplus of the corn he had used to throw at Samuel's bedroom window out of his jacket pocket into its receptacle. Bennett characterizes him, at this moment of crisis, through the part of his mind that doesn't yet realize what has happened. Crises are supposed to -625- reveal, to set naked self against naked world. Bennett is more interested in the illusions that remain.
A new kind of plot was needed to demonstrate how such illusions-such nescience-might form a personality. Bennett's protagonists advance their hollowness into a world which, as they age, becomes ever more crowded, ever more impenetrable. They feel the changes in pressure within them, but the shell of their nescience never cracks, as it would in a «French» novel; nor is it ever filled up, with hard-earned wisdom, with love, as it would be in an «English» novel. The heroine of Leonora (1903), watching her husband die, realizes that she has been created not by love but by the 'constant uninterrupted familiarity' of married life. It is an acknowledgment produced not by abrupt revelation but by illusions mutually adjusted over a long period of time.
The term Bennett found for lives not shaped by development or degeneration was 'declension.' A chapter in Hilda Lessways is entitled 'Miss Gailey in Declension' and describes the deterioration of Hilda's dancing instructor. Declension involves a gradual loss of energy, will, presence, significance. But there is a gain to be had from the erosion of these qualities, which constantly demand that one live up to an ideal or self-image, or fashion oneself according to social convention. It is a gain of definiteness, of irreducible difference. I don't know whether Bennett had the grammatical sense of declension in mind. That sense is appropriate, because the declensions he portrays are not merely disablements, but variations in the form a person's life can take.
In the end, in Bennett's novels, loss and gain are hard to distinguish, as they are in many people's lives. Miss Gailey is a spinster, and his spinsters (Janet Orgreave, for example, in the Clayhanger series) remind us that an identity created by not willing, by not signifying, is at once, and inextricably, formation and deformation. Few people in Bennett's fiction escape declension. At the end of Whom God Hath Joined (1906), Laurence Ridware, who has just survived a punishing divorce, wonders whether he should propose to a much younger woman, Annunciata Fearns. But he simply doesn't have the energy. Edwin Clayhanger is motivated during his youth by a fierce hatred of Methodism. But by the time he is asked, in These Twain (1916), to serve as District Treasurer of the Additional Chapels Fund, he doesn't even have enough animosity left for a contemptuous refusal. His ambition goes the same way: 'His life seemed to be a life of half-measures, a continual falling-short.' Yet he is in his way fulfilled, even assertive. -626-
Bennett regarded marriage as the test, and the fulfillment, of the identity that declension creates. Toward the end of These Twain, Hilda wants to move to the country, and she persists in her arguments even though she knows perfectly well that Edwin wants to stay in town. Edwin has to come to terms with the fact that his wife, in denying his clearly stated preference, is denying him.
If Hilda had not been unjust in the assertion of her own individuality, there could be no merit in yielding to her. To yield to a just claim was not meritorious, though to withstand it would be wicked. He was objecting to injustice as a child objects to rain on a holiday. Injustice was a tremendous actuality! It had to be faced and accepted. (He himself was unjust. At any rate he intellectually conceived that he must be unjust, though honestly he could remember no instance of injustice on his part.) To reconcile oneself to injustice was the master achievement.
To reconcile oneself to injustice is to acknowledge the irreducible difference of other people, an acknowledgment enforced not by revelation but by long familiarity. The passage brilliantly renders Edwin's habits of mind: the faint pomposity, the honesty that compels him not to confess to injustice and so claim the authenticity of sudden illumination. These habits are his difference from Hilda, and what she loves in him.
One final example will demonstrate the extent to which Bennett deviated from a degeneration plot, which was nonetheless very much in his mind. The Old Wives' Tale follows the destinies of the two Baines sisters: cautious, commonsensical Constance, who inherits her father's haberdashery store and marries the chief apprentice, Samuel Povey; and passionate, unsettled Sophia, who elopes to Paris with a commercial traveler, Gerald Scales. Bennett's treatment of sexual desire, which, traditionally, either reveals us to ourselves as we really are or destroys us, tested his faith in declension to the limit. Frank Harris expressed disappointment that there wasn't more of the 'superb wild animal' about Sophia; Bennett thought him dismally sentimental.
Bennett undid the wild animal in Sophia by, so to speak, writing his declension plot over the degeneration plot of Zola's Nana, the story of the spectacular rise and fall of a courtesan. Sophia's Paris is Nana's Paris, Paris during the last celebrations before the calamity of 1870. The mob yelling 'To Berlin! To Berlin!' while Nana dies horribly of smallpox is the mob Sophia encounters at the Place de la Concorde. Zola said that his novel described a pack of hounds after a bitch who is not even in -627- heat. Sophia, the object of 'inconvenient desires,' walks unscathed amid the 'frothing hounds' as though protected by a spell. Sophia, unlike Nana, does not sell herself to the men who pursue her. It is the courtesan Madame Foucault, resplendent when first encountered, but increasingly abject, and reduced finally to an 'obscene wreck,' who plays Nana's part. Heredity dooms Nana, the degenerate daughter of degenerate parents, but the Baines stock is sound.
Even so, desire has left its mark on that inheritance. One day Sophia, now the prosperous owner of the Pension Frensham, wakes up semiparalyzed. Struggling to the foot of the bed, she examines herself in the wardrobe mirror and sees that the lower part of her face has been twisted out of shape. The doctor offers a swift diagnosis. 'Paralysie glossolabiolaryngée was the phrase he used.' By the early 1890s, facial, and specifically glossolabial, paralysis had been recognized as one of the major symptoms of hysteria. Sophia realizes that the attack has been triggered by an encounter with a young man from Bursley, which destroys the barrier painstakingly erected between her two lives.
The second half of the nineteenth century has been described as the belle époque of hysteria, and
