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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.