Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/687

 ation of human life with a minimum of desire, or of ability, to interpret it.

To many of the readers of The Old Wives’ Tale, and of Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways brings a sense of disappointment. There was reason to hope that, from the many interesting elements in Mr. Bennett’s singularly uneven work, artistic clearness might emerge; that the author who could so ably render the pathos of age and of illness, the reaction of the imaginative, emotional fancy upon the hard facts of life, would win his way to a triumphant working-out of the truth of informing idea, at one with the truth of observation. The new book marks retrogression rather than progression; the underlying idea is harder to find; the array of facts is less significant. The wearisome repertorial character of the work, and a newspaper quality in the style, are more in evidence than in the earlier books, and the hold upon the actual is weaker.

Hilda, in this minute account of her, is far less real than in Clayhanger, where her personality is more briefly and more imaginatively suggested. Moreover, she hardly seems to be the same woman, except in the earlier part of the book, the blurring and the coarsening of the character differentiating her more and more, as the tale goes on, from the Hilda of Clayhanger. The opening chapters are full of human interest in the presentation of the ironies in the relation of mother to daughter, the nearness which yet means distance; and in the chapters following the feminine sense of expectation, of waiting for wonder-happenings, is often vividly drawn; but, partly because of excess of the analytical method, personality is dissipated among successive moments of sensation, and Hilda is never fully created.

If the old theory of Locke and of Hobbes had come true, that life and thought are but a series of sense-impressions, of disintegrated states of consciousness, this kind of art would adequately represent humanity; but it is not true, and, from this mass of haphazard, momentary experiences clear lines of character-development fail to emerge. Moreover, there is an almost mechanical iteration of psychological states, as the girl’s sense of coming romance clashes with hard realities, and the repeated striking of the one note becomes wearisome. In its unassimilated, uncoordinated detail it is as inconclusive as a shop-window; and, as in most of the work dealing largely with physical sensation, there is no imaginative wholeness of conception. Creation is impossible without selection; the realists who attempt to give the whole of life by telling all the facts make an enormous mistake; the facts are there for all to see, but why write, unless you are able to convert mere fact into artistic truth, observing, thinking, selecting, in a fashion that shall call forth imaginative response from the reader? There are wide fissures and gaps in Mr. Arnold Bennett’s attempt to tell everything; and in the light of this latest book it seems but a lumpy and spasmodic realism that he achieves in following the old query of the realist as to how character can be delineated without imaginative conception of character.

One wonders if Mr. Bennett's admiration for the author of Jennie Gerhardt is based partly upon a consciousness that here is an author who can be even more non-committal than himself in the presentation of endless happenings. Flashes of interpretation, hints of idealism, creep into Mr. Bennett’s work, but in Jennie Gerhardt, which