All which means no more than that the woman novelist quite legitimately does her best to draw a man, as the man novelist does his best to draw a woman, and she succeeds nearly as often; and no woman novelist, past or present, has been more uniformly and extraordinarily successful in this difficult application of her art than Sheila Kaye-Smith. It is usual for the male author to excuse his artistic shortcomings by insisting that woman is a mystery and it is impossible to comprehend her; but it seems likely that he may himself be as much of a mystery to woman and that is why, in fiction, the men she depicts so often seem like women in masquerade. Two of our leading women writers, who can analyse and reveal characters of their own sex with an almost uncanny insight, lose that power when they try to exercise it on the male of the species and he thinks, feels and talks in their pages more or less after the manner of women. They are brilliantly clever in every other way, but can only make man in their own image.
But the men in Miss Kaye-Smith’s novels are the real thing; they are the unqualified male in whom male readers unhesitatingly recognize their kind. Not because they are harsh or brutal, though some of them are that; not because they are susceptible to the lure of the other sex and masterfully override the laws of conventional morality, though some of them do that; not because they are heavy drinkers and lusty fighters with their fists, though some of them are this and some that; but simply because in their general habits, their ordinary everyday behavior, in what they say no less than in what they think, they are obviously of the masculine gender. It is easy to create an illusion that your character is a man if you call him a soldier and describe him as acting with vigor or daring; but take this fragment of conversation, chosen at random from “The Challenge to Sirius,” between Frank Rainger and the retired studious Mr. Bellack. Frank is the son of an embittered gentleman who has withdrawn from the struggle of life; he works, from choice, on the farm where he and his father live, and goes daily to the Rectory to take lessons with Mr. Bellack, but has come to hesitate between his love of working on the land and a desire to go away somewhere and know more of life, and asks his tutor to advise him:
“‘The question is which is the best: happiness or experience? If it’s experience, you had better get out of this hole as quickly as possible; if it’s happiness, you had better stay where you are.’
“‘Which do you think it is, sir?’
“‘My good boy, how can I tell you? Personally I would rather you did not go to London and take your chances there, as I feel that, though you have brains and certain rudimentary gifts, it is not the kind of life you are cut out for, and that you will probably fail and be wretched. On the other hand, never renounce what seems to you a good opportunity and a fine experience because an old chap like me hints at trouble ahead. Besides, your father would rather see you starve as a journalist than grow fat as a farmer. Perhaps he is right—perhaps I am.’
“‘Did you ever have to make a choice of your own, sir?’
“‘Certainly I did, and I chose to be Rector of Wittersham with an income of two hundred a year, no congenial society, a congregation of hop-sacks, and for my sole distraction the teaching of a muddle-headed boy who, at the age of nineteen, is still undecided as to how he shall live the rest of his life.’
“‘So you chose wrong, I reckon.’
“‘How do you reckon any such thing? You don’t know what my alternative was. Besides, you may be sure of this, no matter which way you choose you will never definitely know whether you were wrong or right. The great question of all choosers and adventurers is “Was it worth while?”—and whatever else you may expect of life, don’t expect an answer to that.’”
Now if there had been nothing to indicate who the boy was talking with you would know at once he was not talking to a woman, for there is a man’s way of thinking, a man’s manner, even a man’s voice in all that Mr. Bellack says. There is always this subtle, easy, truthfully realistic presentation of Miss Kaye-Smith’s male characters, of the mild, unassertive, commonplace, as well as the aggressive and more virile of them. Her rustic clowns are as roughly human and racy of the soil as Hardy’s. Robert Fuller, half animal, half saint, in “Green Apple Harvest”; Monypenny, the practical idealist of “Tamarisk Town,” who, ambitious to develop and popularize a seaside resort, triumphs over all obstacles, carries his schemes through, rises to wealth and dignity, and, sacrificing to his ambition the woman he loves, finds himself lonely and unhappy on his height and turns remorsefully and madly to destroy all he has so laboriously built; Miles, in “Starbrace,” with his strangely varying moods, his strength and pitiful weaknesses; the stern, harsh, ruggedly heroic Reuben Backfield, in “Sussex Gorse,” wholly given over to his desperate, indomitable fight for the possession of a wild unfruitful common; Mr. Sumption, the dour, pathetic Baptist minister in “Little England,” a graphic, poignant revelation of what the war meant in a rural community, and one of the two or three great novels of that era—these and, in their differing class and degree, all the men who belong to her stories are real, authentic, humans—are men in flesh and bone and spirit, easy, natural, alive.