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PARTISAN REVIEW
It's worth noting that Bennett's quotation is slightly inaccurate ; he
obviously didn't need to look the passage up. He was right about the
borrowing from Juvenal, for the whole speech is a paraphrase of the
opening lines of the
Sixth Satire.
They say that in the age of Saturn
women were both chaste and tough; that they lacked what Dryden in
his translation calls "the niceness of our modern dames"; big and
bold, they "gave suck to infants of gigantic mold. "
Bennett's pleasure in this observation is very appealing. It
must have helped to confirm his sense of himself as a man of letters.
He isn't pretending to be a scholar: he doesn't ask himself whether he
was the first to notice Fletcher's borrowing (he wasn't) and he doesn't
meditate on the significance of the Jacobean imitation of J uvenal in
a play designed for a new indoor theatre at Blackfriars, or the rela–
tionship of
Philaster
to
Cymbeline,
which was the subject of a book
by the American scholar A. H. Thorndike a couple of years later.
Bennett was not a professor, nor was he an amateur. He was a profes–
sional writer, and in his day professional writers were still bookmen .
Among the subjects with which a bookman of the time would
wish to be acquainted were the classics (available, as we've seen, in
bulk) and the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. A great revival of
interest in that drama had been under way for some time , and its
principal sponsors were not academics, but rather men of letters like
Swinburne and Arthur Symons . To read aJacobean play, to note its
long reach across time to a first-century poem, was thus a proper ac–
tivity for a bookman. In Bennett's case it was perhaps rather
marginal to his main business ; he read Dostoevsky, for instance, in a
different spirit (read him indeed in French, and long before the
vogue) because to do so might help him in his writing. (In fact the
experience caused him to feel badly about his own work in progress ,
Clayhanger. )
In
The Old Wives' Tale,
he sought, he tells us, to catch the
tone of Tolstoy's
Ivan Ilyich .
But he also had a sense of the way in
which literature as a whole bears upon any individual work; so that
one needed to know the classics, including the English classics . And
as one also needed an audience with some literary knowledge , he
decided, with his usual energy, to do something about providing the
necessary instruction. There had been a large expansion in the
potential reading public , caused by the onset of low-grade universal
education; the consequent demand for low-grade reading matter
was met by such papers as
Titbits.
Before we call that wholly
deplorable, we should reflect that not only Bennett but Conrad
made their debuts in
Titbits;
some writers, to be sure, simply turned
