Archibald Marshall, a Realistic Novelist

by William Lyon Phelps

Mr. Marshall began The Squire's Daughter as a long "short story," starting with what is now Chapter XII, Food and Raiment. He fell in love with his characters, as many a novelist has done, and expanded the narrative. Then he wrote The Eldest Son, which is the best of the four books. Yet it was not a success in England, and at present both The Squire's Daughter and The Eldest Son are out of print in their home country; they are, however, having a daily-increasing circulation in America, which is bound to resurrect them in Great Britain. For that matter most of Mr. Marshall's novels are more widely known and certainly more appreciated in the United States than in the land of their nativity. In The Honour of the Clintons, the author's intention was to "take up the old Squire, see what all his generations of gentility and honour, and all his conviction that he is of superior clay, amount to when he is touched with personal disgrace." He discovered, as Dickens must have discovered in writing the Pickwick Papers, that his hero turned out rather better than he thought he would. This third book in the series was written under inspiration, completed in six weeks, and at the time came almost as near satisfying the author as it always has satisfied me. But a friend, with true English candour, said to him, "All the ingredients of the cake are there, but the cake hasn't risen." Anyhow, the Squire rose, whether the cake did or not.

The final novel in the Clinton family, The Old Order Changeth, shows the effect produced on both Rank and Riches by the Great War. Mr. Marshall began this story with many misgivings, and it is still not one of his favourites, chiefly because "there are so many beastly people in it." But so long as I live it will hold a secure place in my heart, for this is the first work of the author's that I saw. Indeed I had never heard of him until I picked up The Old Order Changeth. I started to read it with no conception of the keen delight in store; after finishing it, I wrote to the publishers, "Who on earth is Archibald Marshall? There is no one like him in the world. Send me everything he has written." Since that moment of exaltation, I have read and reread the Clinton books, and each time they seem better.

To read the Clinton stories is to be a welcome guest in a noble old English country house, to meet and to associate on terms of happy intimacy with delightful, well-bred, clear-minded men and women; to share the outdoor life of healthful sport, and the pleasant conversation around the open fire; to sharpen one's observation of natural scenery in summer and in winter, and in this way to make a permanent addition to one's mental resources; to learn the significance of good manners, tact, modesty, kindly consideration, purity of heart—not by wearisome precepts, but by their flower and fruit in human action. To read these books is not to dodge life, it is to have it more abundantly.

If, as Bacon said, a man dies as often as he loses his friends, then he gains vitality by every additional friendship. To know the Clinton family and their acquaintances is not merely to be let into the inner circle of English country life, to discover for ourselves exactly what sort of people English country folk are, to understand what family tradition and ownership of the land mean to them—it is to enlarge our own range of experience and to increase our own stock of genuine happiness, by adding to our mental life true friends—and friends that are always available. For often the friends of flesh and blood cannot be reached when we need them most; perhaps they are asleep, or away on a journey; but the staunch old friends introduced to us by novelists never deny themselves. Is not this a fairly good reason why, among all the novels we read, some at all events should be selected for the immanent charm of their characters? I know how uncritical it is to admire any work of art that possesses the element of cheerfulness; but suppose our reading of novels were entirely confined to the works of Maxim Gorki?

Why should we always select acquaintances in fiction that we always avoid in real life? Is it the same instinct that makes so many persons love to go slumming?

There is perhaps rather too strong a flavour of tea in these stories, but that no doubt is a legitimate part of their realism. The sacred rite of afternoon tea plays fully as big a part in English fiction as it plays in English life. Tea—which would be an intolerable interruption to business or to golf among normal Americans—is never superfluous to the British. Among the hundreds of English novels that you have read, can you recall a single instance where any character declined a cup of tea? And, in terrible crises or trivial vexations, is not the following exclamation familiar—"I am dying for my tea!" I sometimes think that if the house should be destroyed by fire at three o'clock, half-past four would find the family taking tea on the lawn. I remember, on a voyage to Alaska, a vigorous old English woman who appeared on deck every day between four and five, and when she saw the circulation of the china, a look of holy rapture dawned in her eyes, and from her lips came an ecstatic cry, "Ah, is there tea going?" It must be wonderful to love anything on earth so much as the English love their tea.

Two months after writing the above paragraph, I received testimony which delightfully supports the view expressed. An Englishman informs me, that after the big sea-fight of Jutland, he had the privilege of conversing with an English blue-jacket who was perched aloft during the whole of that terrific experience. There he remained under orders, in the thick of the battle, with the bolts of death flying all about him. On being asked how he felt, the young man exclaimed with a tone of regret, "Well, of course, I had to miss my tea."

Not since Fielding's Squire Western has there been a more vivid English country squire than Mr. Marshall's Squire Clinton. The difference between them is the difference between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. He is the man of the house, the head of the family, and it is not until we have read all four of the stories that we can obtain a complete view of his character. He is a living, breathing man, and we see the expression on his face, and hear the tones of his voice, which his daughters imitate so irresistibly. With all his pride and prejudice, with all his childish irritableness, he is the idol of the household. His skull is as thick as English oak, but he has a heart of gold. He is stupid, but never contemptible. And when the war with Germany breaks out in 1914, he rises to a magnificent climax in the altercation with Armitage Brown. We hear in his torrent of angry eloquence not merely the voice of one man, but the combined voices of all the generations that have developed him.

Yet while Mr. Marshall has made an outstanding and unforgettable figure of the fox-hunting Squire, it is in the portrayal of the women of the family that he shows his most delicate art. This is possibly because his skill as an artist is reinforced by profound sympathy. The Squire is so obtuse that it has never dawned upon his mind that his wife is a thousand times cleverer than he, or that her daily repression has in it anything savouring of tragedy. In the third book, The Honour of the Clintons, intense and prolonged suffering begins to sharpen his dull sight; and the scenes between the old pair are unspeakably tender and beautiful. Mr. Marshall never preaches, never tries to adorn the tale by pointing a moral. But the wild escapade of the daughter in the first of these stories, and the insistence of the mother on a superior education for the twins exhibit more clearly than any letter to the Times could do, what the author thinks about the difference between the position women have held in English country homes and the position they ought to have.