Meredith, in “The Invisible Event,” rather grudgingly praises Jacob Stahl’s first novel, “John Tristram,” as good realistic fiction of the school of Madame Bovary. “It’s a recognized school,” Meredith continued. “I don’t quite know any one in England who’s doing it, but it’s recognized in France, of course. I don’t quite know how to define it, but perhaps the main distinction is in the choice of the typical incidents and emotions. The realists don’t concentrate on the larger emotions, you see—quite the reverse; they find the common feelings and happenings of everyday life more representative. You may have a big scene, but the essential thing is the accurate presentation of the commonplace.” “Yes, I think that is pretty much what I have tried to do,” commented Jacob. “I think that’s what interests me. It’s what I know of life. I’ve never murdered any one, for instance, or talked to a murderer, and I don’t know how it feels, or what one would do in a position of that sort.”
That is perhaps a pretty fair statement of Beresford’s own aim as a novelist; he prefers to exercise his imagination on what he has observed of life, or on what he has personally experienced of it. And no doubt the “Jacob Stahl” trilogy draws much of its convincing air of truthfulness from the fact that it is largely autobiographical. In the first volume, the baby Jacob, owing to the carelessness of a nursemaid, meets with an accident that cripples him for the first fifteen years of his existence; and just such an accident in childhood befell Mr. Beresford himself. In due course, after toying with the thought of taking holy orders, Jacob becomes an architect’s pupil. “A Candidate for Truth” shows him writing short stories the magazines will not accept, and working on a novel, but before anything can be done with this, the erratic Cecil Barker gets tired of patronizing him and, driven to earn a livelihood, he takes a situation in an advertising agency and develops into an expert at writing advertisements. Then, having revised and rewritten his novel, he is dissatisfied with it and burns it. He does not begin to conquer his irresolutions and win some confidence in himself until after his disastrous marriage and separation from his wife, when he comes under the influence of the admirable Betty Gale, who loves him and defies the conventions to help him make the best of himself. Then he gets on to the reviewing staff of a daily newspaper, and writes another novel, “John Tristram,” and after one publisher has rejected it as old-fashioned, another accepts and publishes it, and though it brings him little money or glory, it starts him on the road to success, and he makes it the first volume of a trilogy.
Where autobiography ends and fiction begins in these three stories is of no importance; what is not literally true in them is so imaginatively realized that it seems as truthful. Philip of “God’s Counterpoint,” who was injured by an accident in boyhood is a pathological case; there are surrenderings to the morbid and abnormal in “Housemates,” one of the somberest of Beresford’s novels, and in that searching and poignant study in degeneracy, “The House in Demetrius Road”; but if these are more powerful in theme and more brilliant in workmanship they have not the simple, everyday actuality of the trilogy; they get their effects by violence, or by the subtle analysis of bizarre, unusual or unpleasant attributes of humanity, and the strength and charm of the Stahl stories, are that, without subscribing to the conventions, they keep to the common highway on which average men and women live and move and have their being. This is the higher and more masterly achievement, as it is more difficult to paint a portrait when the sitter is a person of ordinary looks than when he has marked peculiarities of features that easily distinguish him from the general run of mankind.
Although, in his time, Mr. Beresford was an advertising expert he has never acquired the gift of self-advertisement; but he found himself and was found by critics and the public while he still counted as one of our younger novelists and had been writing for less than a decade.
He has a subdued humor that is edged with irony, and can write with a lighter touch, as he shows in “The Jervase Comedy” and some of his short stories; and though one deprecates his excursions into eccentricities of psychology, for the bent of his genius is so evidently toward portraying what Meredith described to Stahl as the representative “feelings and happenings of everyday life,” one feels that he is more handicapped by his reticences than by his daring. He is so conscious an artist that he tones down all crudities of coloring, yet the color of life is often startlingly crude. An occasional streak of melodrama, a freer play of sentiment and motion would add to the vitality of his scenes and characters and intensify their realism instead of taking anything from it; but his native reticence would seem to forbid this and he cannot let himself go. And because he cannot let himself go he has not yet gone beyond the Jacob Stahl series, which, clever and cunninger art though some of his other work may be, remains the truest and most significant thing he has done.
JOHN BUCHAN
John Buchan
I have heard people express surprise that such a born romantist as John Buchan has turned his mind successfully to practical business, and been for so long an active partner in the great publishing house of Thomas Nelson & Sons. But there is really nothing at all surprising about that. One of the essays in his “Some Eighteenth Century Byways” speaks of “the incarnation of youth and the eternal Quixotic which, happily for Scotland, lie at the back of all her thrift and prudence”; and in another, on “Mr. Balfour as a Man of Letters”, he says, “the average Scot, let it never be forgotten, is incorrigibly sentimental; at heart he would rather be ‘kindly’ and ‘innerly’ than ‘canny,’ and his admiration is rather for Burns, who had none of the reputed national characteristics, than for Adam Smith, who had them all.” He adds that though Scotsmen perfectly understand the legendary Caledonian, though “in theory they are all for dry light ‘a hard, gem-like flame,’ in practice they like the glow from more turbid altars.”
Having that dual personality himself, it is not incongruous that John Buchan should be at once a poet, a romantic and a shrewd man of affairs. But he is wrong in thinking the nature he sketches is peculiar to his countrymen, the Scots; it is as characteristically English. Indeed, I should not count him among practical men if he had not proved himself one by doing more practical things than publishing; for publishing is essentially a romantic calling as you may suspect if you consider the number of authors who have taken to it, and the number of publishers who have become authors. Scott felt the lure of the trade, in the past, and in the present you have J. D. Beresford working at it with Collins & Sons; Frank Swinnerton first with Dent, now with Chatto & Windus; Frederick Watson, a brilliant writer of romances and of modern social comedy, with Nisbet; Michael Sadleir with Constable; C. E. Lawrence, most fantastic and idealistic of novelists, with John Murray; Roger Ingram, writing with authority on Shelley and making fine anthologies, but disguised as one of the partners in Selwyn and Blount; Alec Waugh, joining that admirable essayist his father, Arthur Waugh, with Chapman & Hall; C. S. Evans, whose “Nash and Others” may stand on the shelf by Kenneth Grahame’s “Golden Age,” with Heinemanns; B. W. Matz, the Dickens enthusiast and author of many books about him, running in harness with Cecil Palmer; you have Grant Richards writing novels that are clever enough to make some of his authors wonder why he publishes theirs; Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, an author, with at least half-a-dozen successful books to his name; Herbert Jenkins, a popular humorist and doing sensational detective stories; Sir Algernon Methuen developing a passion for compiling excellent anthologies of poetry—and there are others.