A George Gibbs novel is characterized by a certain substance and power which make a comparison with the most successful work of Robert W. Chambers rather too natural and too easy to be trusted. Mr. Chambers, by his own admission, has always written the story which, at the moment, it amused him to write. Mr. Gibbs, with an equal equipment, has become steadily more intent on his work, both in the choice of subjects and in the treatment. He has never been without an interest in and a respect for character; and even in novels which are essentially novels of intrigue and suspense, like The Yellow Dove, the characterization is far from superficial. When he has a descriptive passage to write he takes his time to find the words, and his work shows the painstaking. Perhaps Mr. Chambers of some years ago and Mr. Gibbs of today are most alike in their distinct flair for the absorbing, even the fashionable, subject. Mr. Gibbs, perhaps owing to his painter’s side, is unrestricted by place or social stratification. The Yellow Dove opens with excellent Cockney talk; The Secret Witness moves with assurance in central Europe; The Golden Bough details an American soldier’s adventures in Germany; The Black Stone has scenes in Arabia; The Splendid Outcast is vivid with bits of the Paris underworld; The House of Mohun chronicles the rise and fall of an American family stranded between its town house and its Long Island estate; and the heroine of Fires of Ambition is a red-haired Irish girl, an obscure employee of an obscure cloak and suit concern.
A change in Mr. Gibbs’s work, the result of a definite intention which he avowed at the time, can be seen beginning with Youth Triumphant (1921). It resulted from a wish to do novels more truly representative of American life than any he had done. He had come to feel, as Swinnerton expresses it, that romance should spring from a personal vision of life and not merely from that kind of romantic material which has been so much used and which has only the makeshift value of stage properties. The deepening treatment is noticeable in The House of Mohun. It is continued in Fires of Ambition, where Mary Ryan, having conquered life, asks herself: “What are these things I have fought for? What are they in comparison with the love I might have had?” Most observable is the maturer study of character and destinies in George Gibbs’s latest and most competent novel, Sackcloth and Scarlet.
This is the history of two sisters of whom the older, Joan, is a responsible person and the younger, Polly, begins in weakness and progresses toward destruction. The development is smooth and unhurried and the characterization has a certain skill and a gradual intensity which is scarcely to be found in Mr. Gibbs’s earlier books. The scene moves to Brittany, to Washington and to Atlantic City as the story proceeds; and in each case the novelist establishes his people firmly in the new setting. There is very little artifice and what there is works quite simply and directly to show the interrelation of just the three most important people. And yet, in an ordered fashion, the book does bring up very momentous questions—such a question as the difference between motherliness and motherhood, and the graver question of accident and destiny in the existence of a child.
In his fiction George Gibbs has now come to have more points of resemblance and contact, perhaps, with Arthur Train and Rupert Hughes than with other contemporary American novelists. He can, at any rate, be depended upon for sincere and ambitious work, executed by a practiced hand.
BOOKS BY J. C. SNAITH
| 1904 | Broke of Covenden |
| 1906 | Henry Northcote |
| 1907 | William Jordan, Junior |
| 1909 | Araminta [republished 1923] |
| 1910 | Fortune |
| 1910 | Mrs. Fitz |
| Lady Barbarity | |
| Anne Feversham | |
| 1912 | The Principal Girl |
| 1914 | An Affair of State |
| 1915 | The Great Age |
| 1916 | The Sailor |
| 1917 | The Coming |
| 1918 | Mary Plantagenet |
| The Time Spirit | |
| 1919 | The Undefeated |
| In England: Love Lane | |
| 1920 | The Adventurous Lady |
| 1922 | The Council of Seven |
| 1923 | The Van Roon |
| 1924 | There Is a Tide |
SOURCES ON J. C. SNAITH
Excellent descriptive notes on many of Mr. Snaith’s novels will be found on page 155 et seq. of R. Brimley Johnson’s Some Contemporary Novelists (Men), published by Leonard Parsons, London.
An appreciative review of The Sailor forms a short chapter in S. P. B. Mais’s Some Modern Authors (Dodd, Mead & Company). See page 133 et seq.
“J. C. Snaith,” by W. M. Parker, in The Bookman (London) for April, 1922.