The Arnold Bennett Calendar

BY ARNOLD BENNETT

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK

The Arnold Bennett Calendar

Compiled By Frank Bennett

New York George H· Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE·PLIMPTON·PRESS [W·D·O] NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A

[v]

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born at Hanley-in-the-Potteries (one of the “Five Towns” frequently appearing in his writings) on 27th May 1867. He was educated at the endowed Middle School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and matriculated in the London University. From school he went into the office of his father, who practised as a solicitor at Hanley, and stayed with him until 1889, when he took a post in a solicitor’s office in London, which he held until 1893. In that year he abandoned the law finally to become assistant editor of Woman, and succeeded to the editorship in 1896. This post he resigned in 1900 to devote himself exclusively to literature. In the meantime several of his works had been issued, the first being “A Man from the North” (1898) and a handbook, “Journalism for Women,” followed in the next year by the publication of a volume of plays, “Polite Farces,” his first experiments in drama. Afterwards appeared in rapid succession nine other novels, two volumes of short stories, seven volumes of belles-lettres, and seven

fantasias. Besides these he wrote two plays, “Cupid and Common-Sense,” produced by the Stage Society in 1908, and “What the Public Wants,” also produced by the Stage Society in 1909, and afterwards by Mr. Hawtrey at the New Royalty Theatre. Both[vi] these plays were subsequently staged in Glasgow, and by Miss Horniman’s Company. The most important of his publications include:—among novels, “Leonora,” “A Great Man,” “Sacred and Profane Love,” “Whom God Hath Joined——,” “The Old Wives’ Tale,” and “Clayhanger”; among the belles-lettres, “The Truth about an Author,” “Literary Taste,” “The Reasonable Life,” “The Human Machine,” and “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day” (the last four contributed originally to T. P.’s Weekly, and containing indications of Mr. Bennett’s theories of life); and in the short stories, “Tales of the Five Towns,” and “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns.” Mr. Bennett has very definite leanings towards Socialism, and, under a pseudonym, writes regularly for The New

Age. He also contributes from time to time to the most important progressive weekly and monthly magazines.

F. C. B.

The Arnold Bennett Calendar

January

One

The individual who scoffs at New Year’s resolutions resembles the woman who says she doesn’t look under the bed at nights; the truth is not in him.

Two

To give pleasure is the highest end of any work of art, because the pleasure procured from any art is tonic, and transforms the life into which it enters.

Three

There are only two fundamental differences in the world—the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age.

Four

The only class of modern play in which it is possible to be both quite artistic and quite marketable, is the farce.

[10]

Five

To enjoy a work of imagination is no pastime, rather a sweet but fatiguing labour. After a play of Shakespeare or a Wagnerian opera repose is needed. Only a madman like Louis of Bavaria could demand Tristan twice in one night.

Six

Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great men who wrote them. They are the effluence of their very core, the expression of the life itself of the authors.

Seven

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

Eight

One of the main obstacles to the cultivation of poetry in the average sensible man is an absurdly inflated notion of the ridiculous.

[11]

Nine

The crudest excitement of the imaginative faculty is to be preferred to a swinish preoccupation with the gross physical existence.

Ten

The brain is the diplomatist which arranges relations between our instinctive self and the universe, and it fulfils its mission when it provides for the maximum of freedom to the instincts with the minimum of friction.

Eleven

A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the pleasure.

Twelve

The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the will.

[12]

Thirteen

To utter a jeremiad upon the decadence of taste, to declare that literature is going to the dogs because a fourth-rate novel has been called a masterpiece and has made someone’s fortune, would be absurd. I have a strong faith that taste is as good as ever it was, and that literature will continue on its way undisturbed.

Fourteen

There is a loveliness of so imperious, absolute, dazzling a kind that it banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all considerations of right and wrong, and leaves therein nothing but worship and desire.

Fifteen

When homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.

[13]

Sixteen

There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth.

Seventeen

The uncultivated reader is content to live wholly in and for the moment, sentence by sentence. Keep him amused and he will ask no more. You may delude him, you may withhold from him every single thing to which he is rightfully entitled, but he will not care. The more crude you are, the better will he be pleased.

Eighteen

It is only in the stress of fine ideas and emotions that a man may be truly said to live.

Nineteen

Oh, innocence! Oh, divine ignorance! Oh, refusal! None knows your value save her who has bartered you! And herein is the woman’s tragedy.

[14]

Twenty

To extract from the brain, at will and by will, concentration on a given idea for even so short a period as half an hour is an exceedingly difficult feat—and a fatiguing! It needs perseverance.

Twenty-one

A merely literary crudity will affect the large public neither one way nor the other, since the large public is entirely uninterested in questions of style; but all other crudities appeal strongly to that public.

Twenty-two

“Cupid and Commonsense” produced.

Everyone who has driven a motor-car knows the uncanny sensation that ensues when for the first time in your life you engage the clutch, and the Thing beneath you begins mysteriously and formidably to move. It is at once an astonishment, a terror, and a delight. I felt like that as I watched the progress of my first play.

[15]

Twenty-three

Can you see the sun over the viaduct at Loughborough Junction of a morning, and catch its rays in the Thames off Dewar’s whisky monument, and not shake with the joy of life? If so, you and Shakespeare are not yet in communication.

Twenty-four

Adults have never yet invented any institution, festival or diversion specially for the benefit of children. The egoism of adults makes such an effort impossible, and the ingenuity and pliancy of children make it unnecessary. The pantomime, for example, which is now pre-eminently a diversion for children, was created by adults for the amusement of adults. Children have merely accepted it and appropriated it. Children, being helpless, are of course fatalists and imitators. They take what comes, and they do the best they can with it. And when they have made something their own that was adult, they stick to it like leeches.

[16]

Twenty-five

The living speak of the uncanniness of the dead. It does not occur to them that manifestations of human existence may be uncanny to the dead.

Twenty-six

There is no royal road to the control of the brain. There is no patent dodge about it, and no complicated function which a plain person may not comprehend. It is simply a question of: “I will, I will, and I will.”

Twenty-seven

I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economise herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion for her is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety.

[17]

Twenty-eight

Efficient living, living up to one’s best standard, getting the last ounce of power out of the machine with the minimum of friction: these things depend on the disciplined and vigorous condition of the brain.

Twenty-nine

In the world of books, as in every other world, one-half does not know how the other half lives. In literary matters the literate seldom suspect the extreme simplicity and naïveté of the illiterate. They wilfully blind themselves to it; they are afraid to face it.

Thirty

The mysteriousness of woman vanishes the instant you brutally face it. Boys and ageing celibates are obsessed by the mysteriousness of woman. The obsession is a sign either of immaturity or of morbidity. The mysteriousness of woman,—take her, and see then if she is mysterious!

[18]

Thirty-one

Train journeys have too often been sorrowful for me, so much so that the conception itself of a train, crawling over the country like a snake, or flying across it like a winged monster, fills me with melancholy. Trains loaded with human parcels of sadness and illusion and brief joy, wandering about, crossing, and occasionally colliding in the murk of existence; trains warmed and lighted in winter; trains open to catch the air of your own passage in summer; night-trains that pierce the night with your yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysterious villages, and leave the night behind and run into the dawn as into a station; trains that carry bread and meats for the human parcels, and pillows and fountains of fresh water; trains that sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent through the landscapes and the towns, sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, panting, formidable, and yet mournful entities: I have understood you in your arrogance and your pathos!

February

One

The ecstasy of longing is better than the assuaging of desire.

Two

As regards facts and ideas, the great mistake made by the average well-intentioned reader is that he is content with the names of things instead of occupying himself with the causes of things.

Three

Time and increasing knowledge of the true facts have dissipated for me the melancholy and affecting legend of literary talent going a-begging because of the indifference of publishers. O young author of talent, would that I could find you and make you understand how the publisher yearns for you as the lover for his love.

[20]

Four

The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience. And it can learn the habit of obedience by the practice of concentration.

Five

You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally. Art has to do with emotions not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it can only express emotions by means of ideas. What makes music the greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas. Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind. Music goes direct. Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Six

If a man does not spend at least as much time in actively and definitely thinking about what he has read as he spent in reading, he is simply insulting his author.

[21]

Seven

He was of that small and lonely minority of men who never know ambition, ardour, zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient desires are capable of immediate satisfaction; of whom it may be said that they purchase a second-rate happiness cheap at the price of an incapacity for deep feeling.

Eight

No man, except a greater author, can teach an author his business.

Nine

Size is the quality which most strongly and surely appeals to the imagination of the multitude. Of all modern monuments the Eiffel Tower and the Big Wheel have aroused the most genuine curiosity and admiration: they are the biggest. As with this monstrous architecture of metals, so with the fabric of ideas and emotions: the attention of the whole crowd can only be caught by an audacious hugeness, an eye-smiting enormity of dimensions so gross as to be nearly physical.

[22]

Ten

Genius apart, woman is usually more touchingly lyrical than man in the yearning for the ideal.

Eleven

I had fast in my heart’s keeping the new truth that in the body, and the instincts of the body, there should be no shame but rather a frank, joyous pride.

Twelve

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

Thirteen

By love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude.

Fourteen

For myself, I have never valued work for its own sake, and I never shall.

[23]

Fifteen

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.

Sixteen

All who look into their experience will admit that the failure to replace old habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the critical moment the brain does not remember; it simply forgets.

Seventeen

Many writers, and many clever writers, use the art of literature merely to gain an end which is connected with some different art, or with no art. Such a writer, finding himself burdened with a message prophetic, didactic, or reforming, discovers suddenly that he has the imaginative gift, and makes his imagination the servant of his intellect, or of emotions which are not artistic emotions.

[24]

Eighteen

I only value mental work for the more full and more intense consciousness of being alive which it gives me.

Nineteen

Whatever the vagaries of human nature, the true philosopher is never surprised by them. And one vagary is not more strange than another.

Twenty

You can control nothing but your own mind. Even your two-year-old babe may defy you by the instinctive force of its personality.

Twenty-one

To take the common grey things which people know and despise, and, without tampering, to disclose their epic significance, their essential grandeur—that is realism as distinguished from idealism or romanticism. It may scarcely be, it probably is not, the greatest art of all; but it is art precious and indisputable.

[25]

Twenty-two

There are few mental exercises better than learning great poetry or prose by heart.

Twenty-three

The British public will never be convinced by argument. But two drops of perspiration on the cheeks of a nice-looking girl with a torn skirt and a crushed hat will make it tremble for the safety of its ideals, and twenty drops will persuade it to sign anything for the restoration of decency. You surely don’t suppose that argument will be of any use!

Twenty-four

Some people have a gift of conjuring with conversations. They are almost always frankly and openly interested in themselves. You may seek to foil them; you may even violently wrench the conversation into other directions. But every effort will be useless. They will beat you. You had much better lean back in your chair and enjoy their legerdemain.

[26]

Twenty-five

The voice of this spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice—if you will but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of existence.

Twenty-six

The most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of concentrating at will.

[27]

Twenty-seven

Diaries, save in experienced hands, are apt to get themselves done with the very minimum of mental effort. They also tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend to strife.

Twenty-eight

The English world of home is one of the most perfectly organized microcosms on this planet, not excepting the Indian purdah. The product of centuries of culture, it is regarded, not too absurdly, as the fairest flower of Christian civilisation. It exists chiefly, of course, for women, but it could never have been what it is had not men bound themselves to respect the code which they made for it. It is the fountain of refinement and of consolation, the nursery of affection. It has the peculiar faculty of nourishing itself, for it implicitly denies the existence of anything beyond its doorstep, save the constitution, a bishop, a rector, the seaside, Switzerland, and the respectful poor.

[28]

Twenty-nine

I have always been a bookman. From adolescence books have been one of my passions. Books not merely—and perhaps not chiefly—as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, are capable of really agitating me.

March

One

It is characteristic of the literary artist with a genuine vocation that his large desire is, not to express in words any particular thing, but to express himself, the sum of his sensations. He feels the vague, disturbing impulse to write long before he has chosen his first subject from the thousands of subjects which present themselves, and which in the future he is destined to attack.

Two

In the mental world what counts is not numbers but co-ordination.

Three

In England, nearly all the most interesting people are social reformers: and the only circles of society in which you are not bored, in which there is real conversation, are the circles of social reform.

[30]

Four

Anthology construction is one of the pleasantest hobbies that a person who is not mad about golf and bridge—that is to say, a thinking person—can possibly have.

Five

That part of my life which I conduct by myself, without reference—or at any rate without direct reference—to others, I can usually manage in such a way that the gods do not positively weep at the spectacle thereof.

Six

It’s quite impossible to believe that a man is a genius, if you’ve been to school with him, or even known his father.

Seven

It is the privilege of only the greatest painters not to put letters on the corners of their pictures in order to keep other painters from taking the credit for them afterwards.

[31]

Eight

Your own mind has the power to transmute every external phenomenon to its own purposes.

Nine

Anything would be a success in London on Sunday night. People are so grateful.

Ten

The one cheerful item in a universe of stony facts is that no one can harm anybody except himself.

Eleven