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Page 5
For James Runciman was anything but a smug, smooth, sermonical
essayist. He was a Berserker of the true Northern breed, whose fiery
soul glowed none the less fiercely because he wore a large soft hat
instead of the Viking's helmet and wielded a pen rather than sword or
spear. Like the war-horse in Job, he smelled the battle afar off, the
thunder of the captains and the shouting. His soul rejoiced in
conflict, in the storm and the stress of the struggle both of nature
and of man. It was born in his blood, and what was lacking at birth
came to him in the north-easter which hurled the waves of the Northern
Sea in unavailing fury against the Northumbrian coast. He lived at a
tension too great to be maintained without incessant stimulus. It was
an existence like that of the heroes of Valhalla, who recruited at
night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing
bumpers of inexhaustible mead. In these essays we have the Berserker
in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and
there a glint, as of sun-ray on harness, to remind us of the sinking
in the glory and pride of his strength.
The essays abound with traces of that consummate mastery of English
which distinguished all his writings. He, better than any man of our
time, could use such subtle magic of woven words as to make the green
water of the ocean surge and boil into white foam on the printed page.
As befitted a dweller on the north-east coast, he passionately loved
the sea. The sea and the sky are the two exits by which dwellers in
the slums of Deptford and in North Shields can escape from the inferno
of life. He was a close observer of nature and of men. In his pictures
of life in the depths he was a grim and uncompromising realist, who,
however, was kept from pessimism by his faith in good women and his
knowledge of worse men in the past than even "the Squire" and the
valet-keeping prize-fighters of our time.
There was a sensible optimism about James Runciman, Conservative
though he styled himself,--although there are probably few who would
suspect that from such an essay as the bitter description of English
life in "Quiet Old Towns" or his lamentation over the unequal
distribution of wealth. His sympathy with the suffering of the
poor--of the real poor--was a constant passion, and he showed it quite
as much by his somewhat Carlylean denunciation of the reprobate as by
his larger advocacy of measures that seemed to him best calculated to
prevent the waste of child-life.
More than anything else there is in these essays the oozing through of
the bitter but kindly cynicism of a disillusionised man of the world.
His essay, for instance, entitled "Vanity of Vanities," is full of the
sense of vanity of human effort. And yet against the whole current of
this tendency to despondency and despair, we have such an essay as
"Are we Wealthy?" in which he declared the day of declamation has
passed, but that all things are possible to organisation. "In many
respects it is a good world, but it might be made better, nobler,
finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and
silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to
repair the havoc which other men have also made." But he reverts to
the note of sad and kindly cynicism as he contemplates this supreme
ironic procession of life with the laughter of gods in the background,
even although he hastens to remind us that much may be made of it if
we are wise.
These prose sermons by a tamed Berserker remind us somewhat of a
leopard in harness. But they are good sermons for all that, veritable
_tours de force_ considering who is their author and how alien to
him was the practice of preaching. His essay entitled "A Little Sermon
on Failures" might be read with profit in many a pulpit, and "Vanity
of Vanities" would serve as an admirable discourse on Ecclesiastes.
They illustrate the manysidedness of their gifted author not less than
his sympathetic treatment of distress and want in "Men who are Down."
These fragments snatched from the mass of his literary output need no
introduction from me. Mr. Grant Allen has written with friendly
appreciation of the man. I gladly join him in paying a tribute of
posthumous respect and admiration to James Runciman and his work.
W.T.S.
SIDE LIGHTS.
I.
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