New-York tribune., 1919-03-02
Carrying on the "Clay-
hanger" Tradition
in MIR. Benefits Latest Novel, 'The Roll-Call," We
Encounter Hida Lessways Son George Promise of
More Volumes to Come

netts conquest of London. Loudly as he
once boasted that he'd show up the provin-
clallsm of the great city, he has ended by
succumbing to its power and actually ac-
| quiring its most vulgar point of view. The
big northern municipalities survive for
him. They continually heave their bulk
above the horizon of The Roll-Call,' pant
ing with energy and prosperity. But they
are no longer seen as the centre of vital
tradition, they as the raw material
for George Edwin Cannon's architectural
adventure. He is to carve his career out
of them in the form of Gigantesque town
halls. 1t is in this mood of the unscrutinized
ambitions, the ambitious mounting on the
shoulders Of London, that Mr. Bennett in
terprets the capital. Ne longer, as he once
thought, is London the sophisticated and
pretentious and worldly elder brother of
the strong, gruff, kindly northern towns It
is instead subtle and sinewy master Of all
the arts and purposes to which humanity is
heir. 1t is, indeed, worldly, but it is i'm
pregnable in the very civilization to which
its contemporaries aspire. When Hilda and
Alderman Edwin Clayhanger come to town
estimable human beings, but, Mr.. Bennett
confesses it, they are jay.
"This shift in emphasis brings into high
relief the most difficult Of all social themes,
metropolitan specialization and metropoli-
tan concentration on success. Mr.. Bennett
had no longer on his hands homogeneous
group to be carefully and patiently evalu-
ated. He is no longer writing out of deep
dyed ntimacies and warm associations The
person on his hands is an ambitious, soli-
tary youth, Hilda Lessways' son. come up to
town, and that youth is the creature Of a
large and strenuous game which subordi-
mates personal relations and restricts per-
sonal emotions and enslaves every adherent
but the heroic. 1t is this specialization
that handicaps Mr.. Bennett.
"He succeeds in placing George Edwin
Cannon as the egoistic apprentice and
later the rising public architect of his time
He also successfully includes with that
portrait the evolution of the provincial into
q smart and successful Londoner, father of
three expensive children and husband of an
expensive modern London wife. In addition
to this compact portraiture he brilliantly
depicts for his metropolitan reader the new
bourgeois London in which such youth
disports himself-the bachelor club, the os-
tentatious restaurant, the box at the musi-
cal comedy, the motor. And he precedes
this with the grub stage of the youth-his
Chelsea rooming house, the popular con-
cert, the evening party of beer and Drawn,
the Thames excursion boat This diversi-
fed life, tipped in with most accomplished
hand, is rounded UP by the coming of war
in 1914, and Mr.. Bennett completes the au-
daclty of exhibiting the minuti@ of an
architects Office by closely detailing the ex-
perlences of the architect as green lieu
tenant in the royal artillery during the
emotional and psychological values of this
experience-Mr. Bennett repeatedly fails to
focus them. Seen critically and perceptively.
the career of metropolitan specialization is
not an end in itself. 1t is merely variation
on the provincial life and the man who wins
in it without observing the democratic obli-
cations natural to the Five Towns gets no.
where in particular in the end. But the en-
phatic vulgarity in every turn and twist of
George Cannon's advancement does not ar
rest Mr. Bennett. He accepts the career
at its face value. He is content with the
exciting chase into which the youth is
plunged"
"The Roll- -CaU," by Arnold Bennett.
published by George Fl. Doron Companu.