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.”