‘NOTES ON R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM’, BY JOHN GALSWORTHY

In these very few words I speak of Cunninghame Graham rather as a writer, than as man. His peculiar and quite unique talent has been given so far as I know entirely to short stories, and in one book of travels. I confine myself to his short stories, the more absorbing topic of a fellow-writer.

The short story is a form of fiction in which but few English have excelled, and none have reached the super-eminence of de Maupassant or of Anton Tchekov. It is a form in which, for perfection, an almost superhuman repression of the writer’s self must go hand in hand with something that one can only describe as essence of writer – a something unmistakable but impalpable, and not to be laid a finger on. In the perfect short story one is unconscious of anything but a fragrant trifle, so focused and painted before our minds, that it is as actual and yet as rounded, as deep in colour, as fine in texture as a flower, and which withal disengages a perfume from – who knows where, and makes a carnation not a rose, a Maupassant, not a Tchekov.

Now Cunninghame Graham sometimes – as in Hegira, A Hatchment, and other stories – approaches this perfection. I am not sure if he ever quite reaches it, for a reason that, curiously, is his real strength as a writer. Very much of an artist, he is yet too much of a personality ever to be quite the pure artist; the individuality of the man will thrust its spear-head through the stuff of his creations. I may be wrong, but I cannot honestly recall any story of his in which his knight errant philosophy does not here and there lift its head out of the fabric of his dreams, if not directly, then through implicit contrast, or in choice of subject. One can readily understand the queer potency which this particular quality gives to his tales, in an age and country very much surrendered to money and materialism. It is not that he is a romantic; on the contrary he is a realist with a steel-keen eye, and a power of colouring an exact picture hardly excelled.