Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/148

122 122 OOMMONSENSE OF MR. ARNOLD BENNETT his novels are practical demonstrations of that art ; his characters, less or more, are virtuosi in life — learning How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day. And just as in Clayhanger we got Edwin fingering levers and rods rather falteringly — sometimes setting things in motion unconsciously, like the country cousin, new to hotel-tricks, who stepped into a snug waiting-room, pulled the bell-rope, and found himself shooting skywards in a lift — so, too, in The Card we have Denry Machin tugging and experimenting audaciously, using the actual apparatus of contem- porary Potterydom to provide him with money and mansions and as many adventures and victories as were ever carved out with a sword. It is the gayest exposition. Nothing is ever done " off " on Mr. Bennett's stage ; we see exactly what Denry does and how he does it ; how (for instance) fishing a scrap of chocolate out of a glass of lemonade and perceiving its precise relation to Llandudno he converts it into a cool five hundred pounds. Toujours Vaudace ! Like a madcap chaff eur, Mr. Bennett loves to rush himself and his characters into tight corners, trusting to the crush of the crisis to squeeze out the brilliant solution ; and he is never floored. One would like to make a list of these escapades and blithe improvisations, and show how much their effect of reality, of eminent feasibility, is due to the driver's adroitness as well as his daring, to Mr. Bennett's cool eye for relative and ultimate values. But a point perhaps better worth making is the fact that it is the very furiosity of the fun, the element of fantasy and extravagance, that gives the last touch of truth to the tale as a picture of reality. "Every life is a series of coincidences. Nothing happens that is not rooted in coincidence " — thus the raisonneur in The Card. Now the danger that dogs Mr. Bennett's more sober achievements, built up with such Euclidean logic,