Cargoes for Crusoes

i

Certain novelists there are who, if they chance upon worthy material, need ask odds of no writer of fiction now living. I think at once of two Englishmen in this class, and one of them is John Collis Snaith. In such books as The Coming and The Undefeated he has had material of the first order and has wrought greatly with it. And at all times he is a novelist and entertainer of much more than ordinary competence.

The outstanding matters about J. C. Snaith are several. The first is his steady productivity through twenty years; for the number of novelists who sustain their work so long is not large. The second, and a more important matter, is Snaith’s striking variety. As Henry Sydnor Harrison, the author of Queed, has said, Snaith “is absolutely his own man, always doing his own things in his own way and refusing to be deterred; and this quality gives to his published works a remarkable range.” I wonder how many realize what courage, and even what sacrifice, such a course entails? Not many, probably. But the simple fact is that we all insist on putting a storyteller in a particular compartment in our minds. Let a man please us with a tale of a certain kind and we reject a tale from him of any other kind. This is very discouraging to the novelist, who, after all, is not producing Ford cars. As readers of fiction we should select a good chassis and give our novelist complete rope on the custom-built body.

J. C. Snaith was born of Yorkshire folk in Nottinghamshire, 1876. As a youth he played for his county in cricket, football and hockey. His health became impaired and he had to give up athletics. He lives down on the North Shore at Skegness but spends some time in London (where he may be found in a goodly company of novelists at the Garrick Club). But whether in the country or in town, as he says: “Outside of my work, I have no story to tell. I am always submerged in a novel. My life has been singularly uneventful. It seems to begin and end in the writing of novels. I study them continually and each one I write is in the nature of an experiment. In my humble opinion, the art of novel writing is in a state of continual development. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanizing.”

It will be to the point, then, with this modest man to give, chiefly, some sketch of his work. His first novel, Broke of Covenden (1904) is such a portrait of the English squire as no one else, I think, has given us. Those who were delighted by Sheila Kaye-Smith’s The End of the House of Alard, and those who count as a great experience Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga should lose no time in reading Broke of Covenden. Richard Mansfield longed for a play from Snaith’s novel so that he might act as Broke. Well, it is not too late to fashion the play for some one like Lionel Barrymore.

William Jordan, Junior (1907) shares with The Coming (1907) first place in Snaith’s own estimate of the comparative merit of his novels. The two have a certain remarkable likeness. Jordan is a poet of “universal power given to no other person in the modern or the ancient world”; an utterly unworldly youth and man; a symbol of the artist or prophet or poet who comes with a message for all mankind and who finds mankind unready to listen—who is, besides, caught in the coil of a life he does not understand and to which he has no real relation. The Coming, exquisite and powerful, suggests in its principal figure the reappearance of Jesus Christ in England during the World War. These novels are therefore really expressions of the human spirit done with extraordinary force and unusual directness. They are, however, unsentimental, reticent, quiet in tone and they do accomplish in terms of the novel with many accents of realistic detail what men have generally been driven to express in fable, allegory, legend or poem—in other words, with a pretty complete divorce from everyday actuality. Snaith never quite sacrifices that. It is his distinction (unique, I think) to have been able in these two books to take a lofty and sublime subject and bring it to earth without shearing its wings.

The same effect is partly realized in The Sailor (1916), supposed to have been suggested by the career of John Masefield; but here the whole treatment is more markedly realistic and perhaps more open to a charge of sentimentality. Yet The Sailor by virtue of its extreme realism (except the short period on shipboard, which bears only the most fantastic relation to such an actual experience) is richer than either William Jordan, Junior or The Coming in the elements of popular interest and appeal. If it at moments approaches hysteria, so did A. S. M. Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes; if Henry Harper’s rise taxes ready belief, the drama of his upward struggle from dirt and obscurity to freedom and success and power is a drama on which the reader’s interest hangs breathlessly throughout.

Many, and with justice, consider The Undefeated (1919) the best novel Snaith has written. Certainly this can be said for it: Appearing at a time when the public utterly refused to read “war books,” this simple story of a little English greengrocer and his family in time of war became a best seller without any perceptible delay. Even today, perhaps, The Undefeated is most abidingly in demand of all the Snaith novels. “The kind of person Snaith writes about is the kind of person that fascinates me and that I try to write about. How I wish I could do it with his big simplicity!” exclaimed Edna Ferber, when she had finished the book. “A thing of finest spirit. It is one of the few works of fiction I have been able to read through since August, 1914,” was Tarkington’s comment, and other authors were not silent. Among an hundred novels and would-be novels and fact-books about the war, all loud as so many shrieks, this quiet voice could make itself heard. For among many merits in The Undefeated the greatest was the restraint with which Snaith wrote; and he contrived both by tone and by speech to say what H. G. Wells and others, alike in pulpits and on soapboxes, could never seem to utter.

There is another Snaith, the man of amusement who entertains himself and the reader with light fiction. Sometimes it is an engaging romance on the order of his Araminta; again it is a divertissement of youth, like The Principal Girl; most recently it is the friendly fun, by no means unalloyed with admiration, of There Is a Tide. The title is taken, of course, from the familiar, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Mame Durrance, of Cowbarn, Iowa, aided by an aunt’s legacy, and weaponed with her own pluck, seeks her fortune first in New York and then in London. As Miss Amethyst Du Rance, European correspondent of the home-town newspaper, she seems destined to fail in her object. But when her affairs are most discouraging she finds friendship with Lady Violet Trehem, and the gayest pages in Snaith’s novel record Mame’s adventures in English society. Mr. Snaith obviously likes his heroine. He avoids burlesque and his comedy is a laugh with, and not a laugh at. The impossible type of ending is dexterously avoided; and if there is any fault to find it is with the author’s prodigious and incredible assimilation of American slang. He really knows it, though perhaps he doesn’t discriminate with nicety between last year’s and this; but the result is a little like a cook unfamiliar with garlic and using it for the first time.

The main delight in Snaith’s work is unchanging—it is the delight of adventurousness. One may not know in what precise field his new novel will take one, but one goes with him in the certain and satisfactory knowledge that the exploration will be a finished job. “To me a good novel is exhilarating, educative, humanizing.” All three qualities mark his own work.

ii

Like J. C. Snaith, George Gibbs became a novelist for the love of writing novels, and like Robert W. Chambers he is both novelist and painter-illustrator. I say “for love of writing novels” when perhaps I ought to say for love of telling stories; and then the likeness with Mr. Chambers could be extended. The love of telling stories may seem to lie at the base of any novelist’s career; but there are certainly differences. But what one has in mind in the case of Mr. Gibbs is a certain natural activity rather than a studied, deliberate and conscious choice.

He began to write very young, doing newspaper articles of a popular cast on scientific and naval topics. Then his work as an illustrator became more important. For a long while he illustrated his own stories and novels, as well as those of other men. As his skill in fiction developed and a really large audience grew up for the novels, Mr. Gibbs let illustration drop into the background. However, in recent years he has turned again after a ten-year interval to painting in oils. Now that his footing as a writer is secure, he says that to turn from a novel to painting rests him. But at first he wrote only in late afternoon and evenings when the light was too bad for work at the easel.

George Gibbs was born 8 March 1870 at New Orleans, the son of Benjamin Franklin Gibbs and Elizabeth Beatrice (Kellogg) Gibbs. The father was an officer in the United States Navy and died at Trieste while serving as fleet surgeon of the European squadron. Part of the son’s schooling was got near Geneva, Switzerland, and afterward he was entered at the United States Naval Academy where he generally neglected trigonometry in favor of a sketch book and the writing of verses. On leaving Annapolis he entered the night classes of the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students’ League, Washington, D. C. “My days,” he says, “were devoted to writing very poor short stories which steadily went the rounds of all the magazines of the country, only to be returned. I got in debt and began to write special articles for New York newspapers with sufficient luck to finish my art courses.” He came to Philadelphia before he was 30. Cyrus H. K. Curtis had just bought the Saturday Evening Post and Gibbs got work as an illustrator. In 1901 he married Maud Stovell Harrison of Philadelphia and he has been a Philadelphian ever since, living in Rosemont and having an office on Chestnut Street and appearing now and then in the agreeable company gathered at the Franklin Inn Club.

His first book was a collection of boys’ stories on great naval heroes. Then he wrote a long, leisurely French historical novel, In Search of Mademoiselle. After another of the same sort he struck his metier with The Medusa Emerald. With his next novel but one, The Bolted Door, he became an author whose work goes to press early and often. The book went through a dozen editions and Mr. Gibbs, like Robert W. Chambers, decided that illustration was not the better part of valor.

He was frankly glad. “Inventing plots, people and situations is a thousand times more interesting than drawing scenes,” he says. He had long since discovered that when one does both writing and painting different personalities are exercised. And he had in his own case an amusing experience which should greatly console those authors who have suffered from what seem to them the vagaries of the illustrators of their work. Mr. Gibbs soon found that he could not illustrate his own stories perfectly!

“When I approached my stories to illustrate them it always seemed as though they had been written by another person. I got the trained illustrator’s idea from a situation. It never worked out exactly like the picture I had in mind when I wrote the passage. Before I begin a story, I can see every character’s face and how he will move and what he will be doing at various climaxes. But when I come to paint him, I don’t give it.”

A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W. Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment, it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue and suspense, like The Yellow Dove, the characterization is far from superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr. Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr. Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or social stratification. The Yellow Dove opens with excellent Cockney talk; The Secret Witness moves with assurance in central Europe; The Golden Bough details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; The Black Stone has scenes in Arabia; The Splendid Outcast is vivid with bits of the Paris underworld; The House of Mohun chronicles the rise and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and its Long Island estate; and the heroine of Fires of Ambition is a red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit concern.

A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with Youth Triumphant (1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties. The deepening treatment is noticeable in The House of Mohun. It is continued in Fires of Ambition, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life, asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and most competent novel, Sackcloth and Scarlet.

This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident and destiny in the existence of a child.

In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate, be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced hand.

BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH

SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH

Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be found on page 155 et seq. of R. Brimley Johnson’s Some Contemporary Novelists (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.

An appreciative review of The Sailor forms a short chapter in S. P. B. Mais’s Some Modern Authors (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 et seq.

“J. C. Snaith,” by W. M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.

BOOKS BY GEORGE GIBBS

SOURCES ON GEORGE GIBBS

“Illustrates His Own Books” (article and interview), The Sun, New York, 18 February 1911.

“George Gibbs on His Work.” Interview by Francis Hill in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Date uncertain: 1912 or 1913.

“George Gibbs, a Novelist, and His Ideas.” Interview by Theodocia F. Walton in the Philadelphia Press, 21 March 1920.

Who’s Who in America.

Note: George Gibbs’s prowess as a painter in oils deserves a special note. He has painted some splendid nudes which have been widely exhibited, in particular one called “The Gold Screen” which has been at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts, the St. Louis Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and other exhibitions. He has done some striking marines which have been shown at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Corcoran Gallery and are now (April, 1924) on view in Baltimore. He has become a portrait painter much in demand with more commissions offered him than he cares to accept.

In painting as in fiction his effort has been to achieve a steady progression into more serious and more ambitious work; and the difference between some early illustration of his and “The Gold Screen” is scarcely greater than between his first few novels and such work as The House of Mohun or Sackcloth and Scarlet.