THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

stage before being ushered off again according to the élitist tastes of the Modernists. Although ‘Modernist’ writing,
which has its roots in the early 1900s, looked to formal experiment, to verbal pyrotechnics, to synchronic play, and to
the extraordinary in character and expression, more traditional writers, most notably Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells,
developed
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existing lines of story-telling and diachronic movement in order to delineate the ‘ordinary’. To Arnold Bennett,
writing in his disappointingly unadventurous study The Author’s Craft (1914), the mind of the ideal novelist should
be ‘permeated and controlled by common sense’. This ‘common sense’ precluded a break with a received view of
character and with the supposed stability of the narrative form. For both Bennett and Wells the acceptance of literary
convention brought considerable popular and financial success (Bennett’s The Card of 1911, for example, sold fifteen
thousand copies within three years of publication). It also later entailed the overshadowing of their reputations by the
canonical acceptance of the work of those of their younger contemporaries whose self propagandizing had established
‘Modernist’ principles as the leading ideas of the new age.
As H. G. Wells generously acknowledged through the narrator of his The New Machiavelli (1911), there were
hordes of men in ‘the modern industrial world’ who had ‘raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,
uncultured poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle’, but it was only in Arnold Bennett’s novels that he
had ever found a picture of them. These self made, self admiring small capitalists were now of a different breed from
Dickens’s Rouncewells and Gaskell’s Thorntons, but they were generally despised by writers who rejected their
enterprise, their vulgarity, and their belief in the virtue of work and reward. Bennett (1867-1931) is not habitually a
fictional delineator of financial success, but he can be a meticulous analyst of the motives behind thrift, solidity, hard
work, and public virtue. In this his models were, ironically enough, the great French anti-bourgeois writers Flaubert,
Maupassant, and Zola rather than Dickens or Gaskell. His own affection for France and the French tradition gave
him, as the Parisian episodes in The Old Wives’ Tale suggest, a usefully detached perspective on his own birthplace,
and the real focus of his fiction, the five drab towns of the Staffordshire Potteries.
Bennett’s work oscillates interestingly between the poles of an insistent provinciality and domesticity and a taste
for the exotic and the peregrinatory. Many of his novels either describe, or merely contain, a hotel, that temporary
centre of a wanderer’s life, that home-from-home that is never home. An overwritten early work, Grand Babylon
Hotel (1902), and a late documentary novel, Imperial Palace (1930), indicate something of the continuing force of his
fascination, but the sections of The Old Wives’ Tale dealing with Sophia Scales’s Paris Pension and with the two
sisters’ sojourn at Buxton serve to ramify the idea of the hotel as a no man’s land of comfort, tidiness, and
impersonality. Bennett’s finest fiction works through the establishment of contrasts, between situation and aspiration,
between enclosure and flight, between endurance and escape, between security and insecurity. The sequence of three
novels set in the Five Towns, Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916), are haunted by
Darius Clayhanger’s memories of the humiliation of the workhouse and by his son Edwin’s attempts to escape from
the cloying world of
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his father’s respectable business. Bennett’s masterpiece, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), traces the divergent fortunes of
two sisters from the mid- to the late nineteenth century against the backgrounds of a slowly and unwillingly changing
English industrial town and the turbulent Paris of the 1860s and 1870s. The small and provincial are counterbalanced
by the metropolitan and the sophisticated, and generations conflict, converge, divide, and die. Bennett intricately
relates his characters to the shaping topography, geography, class, and culture that surrounds them, but he always
brings them back to acquired habit, the parochiality, and to plod. Similar qualities, exposed in a drab London setting,
distinguish Riceyman Steps (1923). This post-First World War novel recalls physical and spiritual loss and wounding,
but it centres on the limited ambitions and perceptions of a suburban bookseller, his wife, and his barely literate
servant. The narrowness of the world Bennett describes is silently contrasted with that of the dusty and unopened
books on the shelves of a shop whose contents are finally dispersed. Throughout the book the arbitrariness of
commercial value is suggested (even down to a possessive attachment to the shop's dust) but its final pages allow for a
questioning of literary value, of words on the page and the act of reading them. Without being a classic ‘Modernist’
text Riceyman Steps unobtrusively suggests many of the central experimental ideas of contemporary Modernism.
The work of H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946) has many parallels with that of the shop-keeping world of
Bennett, but it has a far more evident political edge and a sometimes perversely ‘scientific’ programme. Wells is one
of the few English writers to be well read in modern science and in the scientific method; he was also ambiguously
persuaded both of the advantages of a socialistically and scientifically planned future and of the inherently antihumanist
bent of certain aspects of scientific progress. His science-fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895), The