significant that both of them willingly and publicly entertained that notion. In refusing the inevitability of authorship, each indirectly claimed a continuity between himself and the multitudes whom circumstances had not guided into literature. Bennett, especially, figured the artist as a sort of laborer, not the isolated antithesis of the salaried employee. He took particular criticism from F. R. Leavis for such contentions as 'It is an essential part of the job of an artist to meet the demands of a market. He need not try to meet all of them, but he must meet some; because he must live, and if he has a family (as he should have) the family must live too.' The calculated provocation in such pronouncements escaped Leavis; Bennett, after all, consistently boomed the work of such «highbrow» authors as James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, and D. H. Lawrence in his Evening Standard column. And Bennett was equally ready to blame readers for insufficient support, observing in his first column that 'the population abuses its liberty not to read. Not enough new books are bought.' Nevertheless, he and Wells both refused to figure the artist as a hothouse flower that required and deserved the special care of the mere workers who made bread. Bennett's jibe rests not only on the reasonable assumption that artists are not entitled to willfully condemn their spouses and children to everlasting penury, but also on an evolutionary vision of the social organism: if artists can interest no one in their work, perhaps they have become vestigial. Wells had mounted just such an argument concerning the decline of poetry in The Outline of History: 'Developing more slowly and against the discouragement of the scholastic, academic and critical worlds, the form of prose fiction -661- rose by degrees to equality with and then to a predominance over poetry. That was what people were really reading, that was what the times required.'
Bennett, however, does not applaud these diminished expectations for literature; he instead goads artists into searching out where the audience for contemporary art lies. He had often declared, after all, that the British audience for serious art numbered only a few thousand, not enough to support anyone. The rest needed to be drawn in somehow; Bennett reflected in 1909's 'The Novel Reading Public': 'If you happen to be a literary artist… when you dine you eat the bread unwillingly furnished by the enemies of art and of progress! Still, there is a holy joy even in that.' The same year, Wells's Ann Veronica appeared, with its contrast between the ineffectual poet, Manning, who clings resolutely to the circle of his own feelings, and the scientist-turnedplaywright Capes (pronounced 'Wells'), who makes his success by roiling the waters of a torpid public through the most public literary art. For Wells and Bennett, to practice a living art was to practice an art through which one might earn a living.
Both men recognized that success did not guarantee quality, nor quality ensure success. Both lamented public indifference to Conrad's work, both contributed anonymously to a fund established for the sustenance of D. H. Lawrence during the lean year of 1918. Certainly, though, Bennett and Wells realized their own ideal of the artist- worker, spinning out apparently endless skeins of words. Bennett even kept score, recording his word totals in his journal at the end of each year: 423,500 in 1908; 312,100 in 1909; 355,900 in 1910. These figures did not include the journal itself, which achieved more than a million words in the thirty-five years of its existence. Bennett credited such industry, not catering to popular tastes, for his relative wealth, arguing that 'authors can only make a fair income if they have a great deal to say-like Shaw, Wells and me-and are incurably industrious, as we are. And they can only make it even then by not trying to make it. Shaw and Wells have always said: Be damned to popular taste. And I have given popular taste a miss for many years now.'
Wells tallied more than a hundred books and pamphlets in his fiftyyear career, including the only world history ever written by a novelist. Nor were books all that Wells and Bennett wrote; each understood the relation between keeping one's name before the public through journalism and attaining an audience for one's novels. They thus eventual-662- ly earned far more than the daily bread in which Bennett had rejoiced early in 1909. Bennett perhaps spent more ostentatiously-he was particularly despised for his yachts, though he abandoned the sea when his daughter was born in 1926, not being nearly so rich as legend assumed. Wells, the practicing advocate of free love, generally found himself maintaining two households, yet left an estate about twice as large as Bennett's. Both paid heavily for their friendly rivalry of words and pounds in the contempt of the more fastidious generation of writers and critics who succeeded them. It was particularly difficult for these priests of culture to imagine that novelists with so prosaic a philosophy of their own art would work in any other but a strict realist mode. Such men of the world, the argument ran, could not possibly keep the taint of mundane interests from their work, could not avoid a superficial materialism. They could see only the most obvious realities. Besides, art was too hard for the big audiences Bennett and Wells had captured; ordinary readers want to believe they are reading stories of people, and grow impatient of any style that calls attention to the fact that they are reading fiction.
But in spite of their wealth of similarities-and their similarity of wealth-Wells and Bennett cannot be bracketed together as champions of realism. The crucial opposition in their attitudes toward their art reveals itself even in the modes by which each managed to write so prolifically. Arnold Bennett, his ideas organized in his mind on an afternoon or evening walk, devoted the same hours every morning for years to writing. He separated art and livelihood; while he wrote rapidly in any case, his journalism and lighter fiction had exceedingly shallow roots. He would allow the materials of his serious fiction to ripen for months or even years before reaping them in a novel. For instance, while he wrote Riceyman Steps in the incredible span of five months with virtually no revision, he had first conceived it two years earlier and had been collecting some of the incidents of which it was eventually composed as early as 1913 (ten years before its publication). While some of his voluminous other work has merit, Bennett lavished his best attentions on ten novels spaced quite evenly through his career: A Man from the North (1898), Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), the Clayhanger trilogy (1910–1916), The Pretty Lady (1917), Riceyman Steps (1923), Lord Raingo (1926), and Imperial Palace (1930). He worked as diligently on several other works, but to less effect. -663-
H. G. Wells, despite a similar fixity of hours, took a very different approach to his labors. He wrote in a creative fury, usually revising heavily in the afternoon what he had drafted the same morning. Wells wrote his way toward what he wanted to say, his eye fixed on the object of his writing, not on the writing itself. Bennett knew what he wanted to say; he wrote with his attention turned toward his own technique in writing it. Wells confessed fully attending to technique in only one of his forty-odd novels: Tono-Bungay (1909), though Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Joan and Peter (1918) also received unusual care. The rest he admitted to writing in the journalistic spirit, sufficient unto the work of the day with no pretensions to permanence. In disavowing the artfulness of ninety percent of his novels, however, Wells did not disavow their worth as much as it seems. Art and life remained resolutely separate for Wells, and he valued service to the latter over devotion to the former; he perceived the novel chiefly as a vehicle for the delivery of an idea, a means of transmission. Wells identified «art» with formula, understood the conventions of fictional presentation as barriers against the inclusion of real life. He was not a realist out of respect for a tradition, but as a function of his antitraditionalism. Bennett, however, perceived that the novelist's art was not separable from the novel's statement, that the mode of the novel was itself the transmission. H. G. Wells did not believe in the novel; Arnold Bennett believed in nothing else.
Tono-Bungay epitomizes Wells's work as perhaps no other single novel by a similarly productive novelist does. Tono-Bungay is ostensibly written by its main character, George Ponderevo, who feels his life is worth recording because he has chanced to observe at close quarters an unusually broad cross section of English society. Born to a life of service on a once-great country estate, Bladesover, he is fortunately exiled from his original station after besting a relative of the house's lady in a fistfight over his paramour, Beatrice Normandy, the sister of his opponent. After a brief, nightmare apprenticeship to a pietistic baker, George enters the house and employment of his Aunt Susan and Uncle Edward «Teddy» Ponderevo, a provincial chemist with bold ambitions if little sense. Although Teddy goes bust through ill-timed investments, losing George's small trust fund in the process, George is able to win sufficient scholarship money to attend university in London. He parts company with his insolvent uncle and beloved Aunt Susan for a time. But he -664- eventually fixes himself to his uncle's star a second time, as he has no other way to earn a salary high enough to win the marital consent of Marion Ramboat, a middle-class woman who entirely lacks a taste for risk. Their marriage founders, but Teddy's new enterprise, a patent medicine called 'Tono-Bungay,' comes in spectacularly. At loose in the world of high finance, Teddy eventually overreaches himself. George attempts to retrieve the company's fortunes by liberating a large quantity of an extremely radioactive substance known as «quap» from an unnamed foreign power's African colony. He fails. In the meantime, Beatrice Normandy, his childhood love, has reentered George's life. This love, too, falters; Beatrice is already the mistress of a monied aristocrat. At the end of the novel Uncle Teddy dies, shattered by his financial fall, and Beatrice takes her final leave of George, abandoning him to contemplate the waste his life has been even as he embarks on a new career as a designer of warships. Tono-Bungay exceeds Wells's own hope to have written 'a novel, as I imagined it, on Dickens-Thackeray lines,' to have created a 'social panorama in the vein of Balzac.' This trio shared Wells's concern with seeing through to life, with engendering reactions to the society they represented rather than to the
