15. For the Literary Investor
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AS in the world of finance there are varieties of investment, so in reading. A delicate parallel would be between individual authors and, let us say, the mortgage field; whereas the reader who chooses books included in undertakings like the Lambskin Library, the Murray Hill Library or the Modern Student’s Library is like the man adventuring among well-seasoned bonds. The individual author is the bolder risk, less easily to be abandoned, lacking (usually) the element of diversification; the certainty of interest from those carefully selected Library volumes is somewhat greater and the investment in them is more readily marketable in the discovery that your commitment is shared with the other fellow, who also knows and has read them. Then there is among books that type of investment for which men constantly seek when trying to place their money—the unlisted and almost unheard-of, lonely, isolated enterprise which one may, and probably will, have all to himself....
What follows is a series of what, in the money world, would be called “offerings.” These literary offerings are not necessarily in the least related to each other, although here and there you may find features in common. Each stands on the foundation of its own “attractiveness” to you as an individual; but there is none which has not given a good return to some group of readers, large or less large. Some are well-seasoned; others, although new, show their intrinsic worth for such time and attention as you may commit to them.
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J. C. Snaith, novelist. John Collis Snaith, born in 1876, in Nottinghamshire of Yorkshire stock. Athletic in his youth, before his health became impaired, playing cricket, football and hockey on county teams. Always in the middle of a novel, either at Skegness or in London, where he may with difficulty be tracked down at the Garrick Club, hidden among W. J. Locke, W. B. Maxwell, A. E. W. Mason, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, E. Temple Thurston, etc. His novels exhibit constant variety. Richard Mansfield was always hoping for a play from Snaith’s Broke of Covenden so that he might act as Broke. The Sailor, supposed to have been suggested by John Masefield’s career, was a great popular success (1916) and is read and remembered widely today. The Coming, an exquisite and powerful story in which the reappearance of Jesus Christ in present-day England is suggested, made an extraordinary impression. On the whole it is perhaps Snaith’s own favourite. The Undefeated, a story of England in wartime, had a large sale and gives promise of more permanence than any similar book, including H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling. A recent novel, The Van Roon, is a lighter story written around the theft of a famous painting. Snaith’s Araminta, which is being freshly brought out this year, is a whimsical romance of a country girl who comes to London and is sued for by two noblemen. Snaith says: “Each novel I write is in the nature of an experiment. To me a good novel is a mental tonic, exhilarating, educative, humanising.” He is both versatile and in the quality of his work of unusual excellence.
W. B. Maxwell, novelist. English. A writer who has reached undeniable greatness at times and who, when possessing the finest material, need ask no odds of any living novelist. His most recent story, The Day’s Journey, is a beautifully-conceived and beautifully-written story of the friendship between two men enduring throughout their lives. The differences in character, the obstacles arising in the course of that friendship, the antagonisms and fallings-apart and the renewals of these two old comrades are put on paper with a fidelity of observation, a tenderness and an avoidance of sentimentality that would be difficult to overpraise. Maxwell’s novels are of great variety; attention is particularly called to In Cotton Wool, the story of a weakling. Mrs. Thompson, The Devil’s Garden and Spinster of This Parish are also highwater marks in his writing.
Hugh Walpole. Perhaps no living novelist has shown so uniform a quality or so progressive an excellence. He resembles a stock which, starting at a modest price and unfailingly paying dividends, has gone steadily upward to par and is now quoted at a premium. His great success, The Cathedral, is now followed by Jeremy and Hamlet, which, although not a “sequel,” is a companion volume to Jeremy (most popular of all Walpole’s stories before the appearance of The Cathedral). As Jeremy dealt with the history of a little boy—most singularly resembling the Hugh of Mr. Walpole’s own boyhood—so Jeremy and Hamlet presents the adventures of that boy accompanied by the only proper companion for a small boy, a dog.
Rudyard Kipling. For a discussion of Kipling’s new work, The Irish Guards in the Great War, see Chapter 8. The best exposition of Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare (translated by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her Modes and Morals, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,” offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of Plain Tales from the Hills, of Kim and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy” and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged” securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost universal currency.
Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century. But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate connection between poetry and real life which was established by the naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.” Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.” Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish cathedral.... Afterward, one does not know whether what he has seen was dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground.” The best approach is possibly through The Story of Gösta Berling. Her other great novels are Jerusalem, woven from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land, and The Emperor of Portugallia. Her Nils stories for children are mentioned in Chapter 9. Complete works are best procured in the Northland Edition.