Bibliographies, News, and Notes

151 BIBLIOGRAPHIES. NEWS. AND NOTES Compiled and Edited by H. E. Gerber and E. S. Lauterbach All authors on whom work is actively in progress are listed, even though on some of them no items will appear under their names until we have completed the thorough bibliographies now in progress (eg, Conrad, Hardy, Lawrence, H. H. Richardson, Schreiner). Listing of i terns on a few authors under whose names we have previously published annotations is being withheld until the more comprehensive bibliographies or supplements now in progress have been compiled (eg, Galsworthy, Gissing, Kipling, Hugh Walpole, Israel Zangwill). Parts of this section are now permanently assigned to specific individuals, who receive appropriate credit. Scattered items annotated by members of our staff and various helpful friends are initialed or signed individually. Again, we have had the cooperation of many people in preparing this section, ARNOLD BENNETT By James G. Kennedy [James G. Hepburn, University of Rhode Island, has contracted to edit a collected edition of Bennett's unpublished correspondence for Oxford University Press. His critical study of Bennett is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.—HEG] Allsop, Kenneth. "This Man's Success Still Baffles Me," DAILY MAIL (Lond), 25 Jan 1962, p. 6. Surprised to find people in public libraries still reading B regularly. B is dull; luxurious living made IMPERIAL PALACE the dullest of novels. [Hepburn] Fuchs, Konrad. "Raum and Mensch im Werk des Heimatdichters Arnold Bennett," NEVEREN SPRACHEN, ns, No. 3 (Mar 1961), 130-35. B's place has only urban dimensions in contrast to the large proportions of Hardy's Wessex. B's graceless Five Townsmen, like Denry Machin [THE CARD], play typical, definite roles in their city, which Is an unsuitable place for either pity or tenderness . Like Dickens, B depended upon "deep-working" impressions that he had received in his childhood. B's work expresses the "struggle for existence" together with evidence of "social advance." B was born of the employer class, but not to wealth. His treatment of property relations becomes theoretical when he cannot construe a social distinction in terms of his own family's rise and fall. Yet his eighty volumes show his "enormous diligence" to understand his environment. B gives to some of his characters his own trait of thriftiness, and in Edwin Clayhanger B Intuitively expressed his own dread of becoming poor. Because he wanted to improve the lot of the workers, B felt that, properly, he was a Socialist. He rejected the Tory party as the representatives and vanguard of the wealthy caste, that had enslaved the working class by need and privation. But B did not protest passionately against "social misery"; indeed, though he had been a sufferer, he was a "stoical idealist." CLAYHANGER shows no longing for justice. [B does let Edwin get angry when he recognizes how the working people, and even his father substitute, James Yarlett, are victimized by the tactics of a Tory campaign: CLAYHANGER, Bk III, Chs 15, 17. Ironically, since he himself is 152 victimized by his environment, Edwin spends his fury on the deluded people. He ¡s fiercely determined to be radical immediately after the election (and his father's death). But as an employer himself, he shows a detached understanding of his society's politics and waits solely on social evolution: THESE TWAIN (NY: Doran, I9I5) pp. 232-33, 321, 425, 523, 524. By contrast, B implies, in the sorry death of lngpen, the factory inspector, that dedication to protecting the people Is an altruism inappropriate to that point in social evolution.] B's philosophy of life comes from Epictetus and Marcus Aurellus. B's work invites the reader "to make the best" of human fate: not to oppose it, but to endure suffering and to rçake use of "even the ignoble occasion." Making money is the chief aim of B's "goal-directed" men. No tradition or religion supports spiritual ambitions among them. B's work mediates an effect of the Industrial Revolution—men's becoming poorer in idealistic, as well as in material, values—by showing only how a man lives in his city; only "what he sees and how he reacts." Despite all the basenesses of the Five...