'That Excellent Judge, Posterity'

A reader can sometimes judge the true worth of a writer by the quality of his detractors. Take Dwight Macdonald on James Gould Cozzens. And then consider Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). Today he’s judged a respectable but minor English novelist, something of a documentarian, if he’s remembered at all. In his time, Bennett was a celebrated bestseller. Of his thirty-four novels, the finest I’ve read are The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Riceyman Steps (1923). Bennett’s reputation among right-thinking readers was torpedoed by Ezra Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920) and Virginia Woolf in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.Brown” (1928). High Modernism and snobbery derailed him. 

Bennett wrote on an industrial scale – fiction, plays and screenplays, journalism. In that final category are titles that might qualify as “self-help” --  How to Become an Author: A Practical Guide (1903) and Mental Efficiency, and Other Hints to Men and Women (1911). I returned to a curious little volume he published in 1908, Literary Taste: How to Form It -- a sort of Miss Manners guide for strivers after an air of bookishness but also for people legitimately looking for literary guidance. After admitting that “literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture and as a private pastime,” Bennett adds:

 

“People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilized mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living.”

 

I was looking for a passage I half-remembered in Literary Taste, and found it in Chap. IV, “Where to Begin.” He proposes an imaginative act of time travel. Bennett urges an open mind when it comes to contemporary works and the literature of the past:

 

“In every age there have been people to sigh: ‘Ah, yes. Fifty years ago we had a few great writers. But they are all dead, and no young ones are arising to take their place.’ This attitude of mind is deplorable, if not silly, and is a certain proof of narrow taste. It is a surety that in 1959 gloomy and egregious persons will be saying: ‘Ah, yes. At the beginning of the century there were great poets like Swinburne, Meredith, Francis Thompson, and Yeats. Great novelists like Hardy and Conrad. Great historians like Stubbs and Maitland, etc., etc. But they are all dead now, and whom have we to take their place?’”

 

Bennett is looking forward half a century from 1908. For us, 1959 is even farther away, sixty-five years in the past. Think of the wonderful writers then at work – Nabokov, Borges, Vasily Grossman, Auden and Eliot, Rebecca West, Zbigniew Herbert, J.V. Cunningham and Richard Wilbur, Eugenio Montale, A.J. Liebling, Isaac Bashevis Singer and others.

 

“It is not until an age has receded into history,” Bennett continues, “and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore, beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much wheat as any similar quantity of chaff has contained wheat.”

 

I endorse the impulse but don’t entirely share Bennett's rather touching spirit of optimism.