Arnold Bennett, as Wells himself recognized, was an entirely different animal. The Experiment in Autobiography addresses the question of the 'artistic temperament,' to which Wells rather proudly lays no claim. After contrasting his own readily educated mind with the artistic resistance to education-where he sees sets of relations, authors like Conrad see things intensively as themselves-Wells considers the case of Bennett: 'I would say that in my sense he was absolutely immune to education and that he did not need it… The bright clear mosaic of impressions was continually being added to and all the pieces stayed in their places. He did not feel the need for a philosophy or for a faith or for anything to hold them together.' Bennett is, in fact, a good deal like Bob Ewart of Tono-Bungay. The Ewart type is a commonplace in Wells's fiction, Wells having had just such a friend in youth, Sidney Bowkett. But Ewart, with his pipe, his Francophilia, his mistress, his detached vision of particulars, also owes something to the later friend. Indeed, George Ponderevo's description of Ewart's clear-sighted moral inertia sounds remarkably similar to Bennett's self-analysis in a letter he sent Wells in September 1905. George remarks: -673-
It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in the scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete was this detachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities that played so fine a part in his talk. He was essentially the nature of an artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endless aspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable.
Bennett had written to Wells:
I look down from a height on the show and contemplate a passion for justice much as I contemplate the other ingredients. Whereas you are simply a passion for justice incarnate. You aren't an artist, except insofar as you disdainfully make use of art for your reforming ends; you are simply a reformer… Art, really, you hate. It means to you what «arty» means to me… You will never see it, but in rejecting surface values you are wrong. As a fact they are just as important as other values. But reformers can't perceive this. They are capable of classing chefs, pianists and trains de luxe all together and saying: 'Go to, I am a serious person.'
Bennett's ideal was not an idle Epicurean aestheticism, however. His identification of himself as an artist gave him a position from which to subvert the very realist traditions that Wells sought to extend. In his debates with Wells, Bennett emphasized the necessary unreality of fiction. He responded to Wells's criticism of an «unrealistic» character in Bennett's Sacred and Profane Love by noting that any character is 'an arrangement to suit the necessities of a convention; and here and there he bears a resemblance to a man.' And Bennett's best novels are aggressively polyglossic, introducing several centers of consciousness that undermine each other's claims to authority. Bennett challenges the notion of a human reason adequate to disentangle reality from illusion, competent to recognize the unconscious motives that irremediably color perceptions.
No single novel apotheosizes Bennett's work, but Riceyman Steps (1923) was his most consciously mounted subversion of realist assumptions. By the time he wrote Riceyman Steps, he had long since abandoned any allegiance to realism; as early as January 1899 he had written in his journal, 'The day of my enthusiasm for 'realism, for 'naturalism, has passed.' Not that he proposed to range freely in the zodiac of his own wit; he continued in the same journal entry to declare his intention of 'abiding by the envelope of facts.' But the facts themselves were not the point; as Bennett had written in his journal a year earlier, 'An -674- artist must be interested primarily in presentment, not in the thing presented.' The Old Wives' Tale (1908) is the fruition of Bennett's early emphasis on technique. Superficially the novel states only the obvious; everything declines and dies. But it discovers new meanings in the old theme by the highly articulated symmetries of its presentation. Set in the area of Bennett's birth, the six towns of England's potteries district, the novel depicts virtually the entire lives of Constance and Sophia Baines, the daughters of a shop owner in Bursley, 'the mother of the Five Towns.' It begins with the sisters on the threshhold of adulthood; it ends after Constance, the older, less rebellious and longer-lived, has died. Inspired by Maupassant's Une Vie (A woman's life, 1883), Bennett goes his master one better not only in doubling the depicted lives, but in using them as an extended metaphor for the life of the nation from the mid -1860s to the turn of the century. Where Maupassant's work is an intensive examination of individual psychology, Bennett's manipulates the congruities between personal and public life. It begins with the death of John Baines, the semiparalyzed father of Constance and Sophia Baines, who serves as a symbol of high Victorianism. Both Bursley and Constance, each in its way a 'mother of the Five Towns,' lose themselves when they lose their familiar points of reference. Bursley, at the end of the novel, is ripe to be swallowed up in a newly federated Five Towns (in real life, the six potteries towns were incorporated as Stoke-on-Trent). Constance contracts her final illness by walking, in raw weather, to cast her vote against Federation.
But Bennett extends the analysis by unexpected parallels between stay-at-home Constance and her rebellious sister Sophia. Both engage in simultaneous secret courtships in their youth. Sophia ultimately dies after an attack 'determined by cold produced by rapid motion in an automobile.' Like Constance, Sophia suffers the effects of rapid motion in a larger sense as well. As a young woman, she had eloped with Gerald Scales, who quickly proved a ne'er-do-well. Gerald eventually left Sophia, who finally recovered her fortunes by running a Parisian pension in as hard-handed a Five Towns manner as possible. She finally regained contact with her sister, sold the pension, and returned to the narrow, dark house she had fled. One day, the threatening news of Gerald's return comes. But when Sophia goes to meet him, she experiences 'a genuine unforeseen shock, the most violent that she had ever had': Gerald's corpse, the shrunken body of a destitute old man, a man she had last seen in vigorous youth. On her automobile ride -675- back to Bursley after viewing the body, Sophia suffers her fatal attack. The deaths of the two sisters are at once parallel and divergent. Both, of course, are victims of time, but while the rapidity of social movement undoes Constance, Sophia is staggered by generational succession. As Bennett's novel shows, and as Sophia partly recognizes, each generation relives the experience of its predecessors; there is no unique identity in the face of the universality of age and death. The novel is filled with casual references to ancestors and descendants who mimic the lives of the main characters; it quietly includes the generations of dogs who live and die within the lifetime of the sisters. The novel ultimately besieges the notion of essential identity from opposite directions: the world changes, and we are no longer who we thought, our points of orientation being gone; the world stays the same, and we are no longer who we thought, our lives replaying universal patterns.
But even The Old Wives' Tale, though to a lesser extent than Anna of the Five Towns (1902) or Clayhanger (1910), rests on the assumption that the world impinges on human consciousness more than the opposite, and that the dimensions of its influence may be judged by human reason. As do all the Five Towns novels, The Old Wives' Tale focuses on characters who have very little power, and who struggle with only partial success to organize their lives as they see fit, despite the restrictions of their familial, social, and physical environments. In all the Five Towns novels, particularly Clayhanger, the hope to reorganize society along more rational lines remains unrealized. When Bennett shifted the locale of his fiction to London, he began to focus on middle-aged men who have the power to implement their own visions of a rational life. The adequacy of that vision, and the objectivity of reason (particularly of the sort in which men have often asserted their superiority over women), are themselves called into question.
In 1917, Bennett decided that he had worked the Five Towns vein artistically dry and turned to London, devising what he called in a letter to André Gide 'a new manner,' which he first assayed in The Pretty Lady (1917) and perfected in Riceyman Steps. Never comfortable making claims for his own books, Bennett characterized Riceyman Steps to Gide as 'réaliste,' but then undercut the description by continuing that he was 'almost succeeding' in his attempt 'to invent a form to supersede Balzac's.' Bennett had coveted the sociological method of La comédie humaine when he embarked on his series of Five Towns novels; now he sought a new balance between the comprehensible influences of -676- social structures and the incomprehensible force of the unconscious. The First World War in particular broke Bennett of his earlier, Wellsian belief in the adequacy of conscious organization to revise the dangerous habits into which the industrial world had fallen. Riceyman Steps grew from the graveyard of the war. It grew, more particularly, from a yachting trip Bennett took in 1921, with the physician and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers-Siegfried Sassoon's doctor-aboard for part of the cruise. Rivers, an early English disseminator of Freud's ideas, reported in his Instinct and the Unconscious (1921) that the war had hastened acceptance of Freudian ideas by the British medical community, shell shock demonstrating the operation of repression more convincingly than any prewar civilian neurosis had. He talked of Freud and war neurosis with Bennett, who later described that encounter as 'the most truly educational experience I have ever had,' noting
