Frank Kermode
THE DECLINE OF THE MAN OF LETTERS
InJuly 1899, Arnold Bennett, not thirty-two years of age,
was still in the first stages of a literary career. He had written one
thoughtful novel,
The Man from the North;
he had sold some stories,
and he was a practiced journalist, working on a woman's paper. Like
many aspiring writers, though perhaps with more assiduity than
most, he kept a journal. Over many years he set down in this journal
anything that might be of value to him as a professional writer: books
read, plays seen, meals eaten, people met, the number of words
written, the income they produced. At the height of his fame these
figures were truly prodigious, but in 1899 he was still only on the
threshold of fame, beginning to prosper but still aspiring.
One day in July 1899 he mentions that he has bought a hun–
dred volumes of a classics series issued by the publisher Bohn . These
books, which you will still sometimes see in secondhand shops, were
the Penguin classics of their day, but their sober bindings are not in–
vitations to impulse-buying, and a hundred of them in a row might
be thought to constitute less a promise of immediately accessible
bliss than a serious call to membership of an elite, the elite of the
truly literary, of
bookmen,
to use the periodic expression . It was ad–
mittedly characteristic of Arnold Bennett to buy the classics in batches
of a hundred at a discount, but his prime object was to join that elite .
Having unpacked the books, he sampled his new possessions
by cutting the pages
ofJuvenal;
and at once he came upon something
of unusual interest. For, as the
Journal
tells us, "the celebrated and
marvellous passage in Beaumont and Fletcher's
Philaster,
about marry–
ing a 'mountain girl,' in which occur the lines: 'And bear at her big
breasts/ My large coarse issue,' must certainly be based on a passage
in
J
uvenal's
Sixth Satire."
The lines he had in mind are these:
some mountain girl
Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
Whereon she dwelt, that might have strewed my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skin of beasts,
Our neighbors, and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue .. .
(Phiiaster,
IV. iii 7-12)
Editor's Note: This article was first presented as a talk given at the American Acad–
emy of Arts and Sciences, on February 9, 1983.
