Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/156

180 COMMONSENSE OF MR. ARNOLD BENNETT of the organism and destroying them in order to make one immense publicity ") to a human " convent of girls requiring sugar and couches and thirsting for love." And in the second there is a tale of a domestic squabble, a squabble that ends with a i^oached egg spinning across a breakfast-table, flung by on over- strung small wife, that positively humanizes the whole of New York. The flight of that egg is like a metaphor reversed. It is the flight of the American eagle stated in homelier terms. But perhaps the finest effect of this faculty for reducing all things to the personal equation is the neat way it packs up and makes portable the whole of the physical side of the great American scene. In an old land like Italy, say, where so much that is essential to the onlooker lies outside the private life of the citizen, it probably would not work very well ; but in America, the Land of Performance, where every- thing visible is a piece of apparatus, and the whole structure is indeed a house of Cards, this valuation of all things in terms of their net human value, their power for effectual "functioning," does shrink down the whole place, keeping it perfectly proportioned, and at the same time passes it over to us in a condition that requires only the addition of our own daily experience to swell it back to its full size, firm and vivid. Mr. Wells and Mr. James, the best packers we have had hitherto, employed a much less reliable process. They strove to vaporize what they saw, turned it into generalizations, and sent us over con- signments of the spirit of the place, which we had to recondense in accordance with accompanying directions. They sent diagrams too, but in the main they followed the Franco-Paternal plan. Mr. Bennett delivers the goods. From generalizations of any sort, with immense self-denial, he steadily refrains. In th^ whole book there are only three ; ** It seems