Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/150

124 124 COMMONSENSE OF MR. ARNOLD BENNETT it really fits like a key straight into the book's winning qualities. For the rum mental law that makes our Ruskins and Swinburnes — our supreme lovers and masters of richly orchestrated words — practically post- deaf to every other kind of music (Ruskin couldn't tell burne was nearly as bad) seems to have a corollary which provides that men like Mr. Shaw and Mr. Bennett (rapt adorers of St. Cecilia, devotees of grand opera) shall possess, by way of set-off, the musician's bump of mathematics, and so, when they come to write, shall cling always to the logical — playing words like chessmen, never like keys — arranging them in rational rows, stripped brightly bare of all the illu- sive, incalculable, mysterious, magical, eminently un- reasonable aids of melody and cadence. Of course, their work has its beauty, but it is architectural, not oral ; it is all explicit, male, classical, never feminine or fugitive ; it says all it means, despises implications, never tries to beglamour us with spells or shifting gleams ; its very visions are passed on to us as obser- vations. Mr. Bennett's circumstantial statements ! And his marks of exclamation ! And his geometrical progressions of conjunctions ! It is the writing of a man who has discovered the romance of the reason- able, the wild excitement of watching logic track and pounce. But it is also the work of a man who likes pure music so much that he has a contempt for the bastard verbal kinds. Mr. Shaw's favourite recreation is playing a pianola. Any one could guess it from his way of holding his pen. And a performance on a pianisto is the first thing Denry Machin gives us when the curtain rises on this continuation of The Card. We might have known it before the curtain went up. With nothing more to go upon than Mr. Bennett's way of dealing out his sentences, both Denry and his pianisto could be predicated.
 * ' Auld Lang Syne " from " Annie Laurie," and Swin-