VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 192, 15 August 1931, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

THE CURIOSITY OF ARNOLD BENNETT It is the incurable homeliness and naivete that lie at the roots of his character that give Mr Bennett his freshness of vision and his childlike astonishment at the wonderful thing that has happened to him. He set out as a bop from the provinces to conquer the great world. . . . He interests us because he is so amazingly interested himself. He recites the contents of a drapery shop with such enthusiasm that the picture becomes a vivid personal experience of our own. IVe may have seen a hundred drapery shops ourselves without emotion and without interest; but here is a drapery shop called up out of the past that, by some magic, is as fascinating as a fairy tale. He does not achieve this miracle as Dickens achieved it, by per sonifying inanimate things, by making them fantastically alive: he achieves it by the medium of his own unfailing interest in his theme, whatever it happens to be, and by the incomparable simplicity an d directness of the relation. It is the ordinary things of life that he makes so extraordinary. He does not say with Byron, "I want a hero”; still less does he want sensational action. The movement of his narrative—l speak of his great novels, not of his potboiling “Lilians,” and “Pretty Ladies,” or of his gay fantasies— is almost as uneventful as that of Jane Austen, and I recall only one heroic figure in all his Work —that of Elsie, the poor “slavey” in “Riceyman Steps.” It is the commonplaces of life, and the commonplace men and women that journey through life, that he trans lates in the alembic of his imagination. . . . He is like a child at a fair, passing from booth to booth with devouring appetite to see and experience. He not ony wants to know how things are done; he must know how to do them. It is not enough to admire pictures: he must paint them. He must Provide his own music, sail his own boat, engross his own conveyance (for, the son of a solicitor, he began life in a lawyer’s office and won the esteem of his employers by his ingenuity in drawing up bills of costs), write his own criticism. He will explain the art of the barber to you and tell you wherein the I ialian barber surpasses the Dutch barber. . . With him, it is never 100 late to learn anything or everything. I met him not long ago and mentioned that I wanted a subject for an article. 11l give you one,” he said. “I am fifty-seven and a-half years; 1 am thirteen stone; and I have just come from a dancing lesson."—A. C. Cardiner, in “Portraits and Portents.”