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the penitent secure in the privacy
of an anonymous communication. The ordinary man and woman have
just as much of the stuff of tragedy and comedy in their lives as the
Lord Tomnoddy or Lady Fitzboodle, and as there are many more of
them--thank Heaven!--than the lords and ladies, the masses afford a far
more fertile field for the psychological student of life and character

than the classes. They are, besides, much less artificial. There are fewer
apes and more men and women among people who don't pay income
tax than among those who do. As Director-General of the Answers to
Correspondents column of The Family Herald Mr. Runciman was
brought into more vitalising touch with the broad and solid realities of
the average life of the average human being, with all its wretched
pettiness and its pathetic anxieties, its carking cares and its wild,
irrational aspirations, than he would have been if he had spent his
nights in dining out in Mayfair and lounged all day in the clubs of Pall
Mall.
The essays which he contributed to The Family Herald were therefore
adjusted to the note which every week was sounded by his innumerable
correspondents. He was in touch with his public. He did not write
above their heads. His contributions were eminently readable, bright,
sensible, and interesting. He always had something to say, and he said
it, as was his wont, crisply, deftly, and well. And through the chinks
and crevices of the smoothly written essay you catch every now and
then glimpses of the Northumbrian genius whose life burnt itself out at
the early age of thirty-nine.
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.