John Galsworthy

WRITERS OF THE DAY

GENERAL EDITOR: BERTRAM CHRISTIAN

JOHN GALSWORTHY

By SHEILA K AYE-SMITH

NOVELS

THE TRAMPING METHODIST

STARBRACE

SPELL LAND

ISLE OF THORNS

THREE AGAINST THE WORLD

SUSSEX CORSE

BELLES LETTRES
SAMUEL RICHARDSON

WILLOWS FORGE AND OTHER POEMS

JOHN GALSWORTHY

m

JOHN
GALSWORTHY

By
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PR

Published in f9/6

CONTENTS

PAOB

INTRODUCTION 9

THE PLAYS. 1 17

THE PLAYS. II. ..... 35

THE NOVELS. 1 52

THE NOVELS. II 69

THE SKETCHES 86

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST . . . .100

BIBLIOGRAPHY 115

AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . .118
INDEX , . .121

INTKODUCTION

ACHARACTEKISTIC of every age
is its group of popular writers.
These writers at once concentrate
and give out the spirit of their age — they
are representative. Literature has many
names of pioneers and apostles, who were
ahead of or out of sympathy with their
times, but these were never popular. The
popular writer is essentially a man who
conforms to his period; it is true that his
conformity must have life and vigour, it
must have nothing in it of the echo or the
slave, it may even be disguised rather
transparently as revolt — but whatever enter-
prises and excursions he allows himself, he
remembers that there are certain bases which
he must keep, and to which after every
expedition he must come back. These bases
are either the conventional ideas of his time,
9

JOHN GALSWORTHY

or the conventional methods of attacking
them — the two are for such purposes the
same.

So a glance at our most popular modern
writers ought to give us a clue as to the
spirit of to-day. But here there is some-
thing baffling — we find names as far apart
as H. G. Wells and Florence Barclay, Arnold
Bennett and Hall Caine. Surely the spirit
of the age is not broad enough to include
both Joseph Conrad and Marie Corelli.
This brings us face to face with a modern
complication: we have two publics. The
spread of education, with other causes, has
brought into being a mob- public, and the
approved of the mob- public have a popu-
larity which could hardly have been realised
two generations ago. The most popular
writer of to-day is he whose appeal is to the
man in the street, and the largest sales are
made by those who are most successful in
catering for this newly enfranchised reader
— with whom literature and art have not
hitherto had much truck, but with whom
10

INTRODUCTION

they will have to reckon more and more as
time goes on.

There is, however, a public above the
street, and this is large and important
enough to allow those who write for it to
call themselves popular. This public grants
its favour on grounds literary as well as
emotional — it is not enough to stir its feelings,
one must tickle its taste. It is funda-
mentally the same as the mob in its ideas,
but it is very different in its methods of
criticism. The mob likes to see its prejudices
upheld, this public above the street — which
is the public that most writers of any
" literary " aspiration supply — while holding
the same prejudices as strongly at heart,
rather enjoys seeing them overthrown on
paper. At the same time it demands
artistic quality, reality, and an occasional
shock. While not actually gourmet, it is
fastidious in the matter of literary fare,
and it is characteristically split up into
cliques or smaller publics, each swearing
by a particular writer, just as men who
11

JOHN GALSWORTHY

are nice as to food swear by a particular
restaurant. There is a Wells public, differ-
ing slightly if not essentially from the
Bennett public; there is a Kipling public
— with democratic foundations; there is a
Conrad public, and a Galsworthy public —
and the Galsworthy public is perhaps the
smallest of all.

Indeed Galsworthy can hardly be called
a " popular " writer. I am not using the
word in a contemptuous sense, but to de-
scribe a writer who is widely read. Gals-
worthy will never be widely read, for he
alienates two important sets of readers —
those who insist that a book shall teach
them something, and those who with equal
force insist that it shall teach them nothing.
He fails the first class because, while supply-
ing its demands, he does not satisfy the
conditions it imposes. He undoubtedly
has something to teach, but he avoids the
direct appeal, which is what the public
wants. Direct and open championship is
the only way of making a cause popular—
12

INTRODUCTION

let us be broad-minded, by all means, but
agreeing that " there may be something to
say on the other side " is very different from
finding out what that something is, and
saying it. Also he is too sensitive, too
\ moderate, too well balanced to please the
" improvement - above - all- things " reader,
whose perceptions are not of the subtlest.

On the other hand, he puts himself out of
touch with those who do not want to be
taught, because he undoubtedly has a pro-
* paganda, and is not an artist purely for art's
sake. Between himself and the numbers who
would unhesitatingly admire him as a man
of letters he raises the barrier of ideas which,
while too subtly expressed to satisfy those who
clamour for instruction, are quite decided
enough to eut off those who object to it.

Thus Galsworthy's public is whittled down

to those who either are in sympathy with

his aims and methods — and there must be

few who understand both — or are able to

. swallow a small amount of propaganda for

the sake of art. He sets out to write

13

JOHN GALSWORTHY

deliberately for no man — he does not recruit
his readers, they are volunteers. They
come to him from widely different camps,
and concentrate in an admiration which is
perhaps as full of reserves as its object.

He has deliberately rejected all public-
snatching tricks, revealing his personality
in his work alone, avoiding the light of
popular curiosity and journalistic enter-
prise. He has treated his private life as his
own concern, not as a bait for readers. A
judicious use of his own personality and
private affairs is, broadly speaking, indis-
pensable to the seeker after popularity.
Galsworthy, by disliking this, has necessarily
limited his public to those who read him
for his work's sake.

In the bare facts of his life that he chooses
to give we shall find* nothing so interesting
as what we find in his books and plays.
Born in 1867, at Coombe in Surrey, he was
educated at Harrow and at Oxford. He was
called to the Bar in 1890, but practised
very little.

14

INTRODUCTION

He has travelled a great deal, and widely
— America and Egypt, Canada and the
Cape, British Columbia and Australia,
Russia and the Fiji Islands. It was on the
sailing ship which carried him from Adelaide
to South Africa twenty- two years ago that
he made friends with a sailor who now, as
Joseph Conrad, has a fame equal to Gals-
worthy's own. It is remarkable that, in
spite of these wide wanderings, his plays
and novels should almost invariably have
an English background. Seldom, if ever,
does he go afield, and then it is only to
some place more or less known to everyone,
such as Austria in Villa Rubein, The Dark
Flower, and The Little Dream. He has never,
like Conrad, given us the fruit of his voyag-
ings on the far seas, or his tracks over
Russian and Canadian plains.

Perhaps this may be due to the fact that
no matter how far he may have wandered,
his roots are English. Though born in
Surrey, he is a Devon man. Galsworthy is
of course a well-known Devon name, and
15

JOHN GALSWORTHY

for many years now he has lived in Devon,
on the eastern rim of Dartmoor.

Again and again he gives Devon to us —
there is A Man of Devon, with its tender
freshness of the Devon soil sweetening the
strength of Devon hardihood ; there is A Bit
o' Love, with its living and poetic conception
of Place ; and there is The Patrician, with all
the breadth of the moors in contrast with
the littleness of human passion and human
reasoning. Again, too, in Riding in Mist, we
have a picture of a mood of the Devon tors
which has seldom been equalled and never
surpassed. Also his Moods, Songs and
Doggerels is full of the county, its scenery, its
men and women, its dialect, its rains, its
" heather gipsy " wind. Though Galsworthy
is certainly not an interpreter of place, though
his great novels and plays deal with the
mysteries of human nature rather than with
local subtleties — and the atmosphere he sheds
over his work is generalrather than particular,
the spirit rather than the ghost — one feels
that Devon is the background of his dreams.
16

THE PLAYS

GALSWORTHY takes his pkce in
modern literature chiefly by virtue
of his plays. Criticism may to a
certain extent damage him as a novelist,
but the most searching critics cannot leave
him anything less than a greatlplaywright.
His talents are specially adapted to the
dramatic form, which at the same time does
much to veil his weak points. His mastery
of technique nowhere shows to greater ad-
vantage than on the stage, nor has he better
scope for his true sense of situation ; on the
other hand, the stage is a legitimate field
for propaganda, and the occasional failure
of the human interest in his work can be
made good by the ability of the actor.

For Galsworthy's plays have the advan-
tage of acting well — unlike much literary
B 17

I

JOHN GALSWORTHY

drama, they are as effective on the stage as
in the study ; in fact, they gain by acting,
because, as I said, he has a tendency now
and then to subordinate the human interest
to the moral, and this the actor can make
good.

He stands midway between the purely
literary and the purely popular playwright,
and he also occupies middle ground between
drama which is entirely for instruction
and that which is for amusement only.
Poles apa0 on one hand from the light
comedies of H. H. Davies and Somerset
Maugham, he has very little in common
with stage preachers such as Shaw and
Barker. More polished and more subtle
than Houghton, he is less clear- eyed and
heroic than Masefield. Undoubtedly his
most striking quality as a dramatist is his
sense of form and craft, but he is far re-
moved from that school of playwrights, of
which Pinero and H. A. Jones are leaders,
whose technique amounts to little more
than a working knowledge of the stage.
18

THE PLAYS

Galsworthy loves, in his novels as well |
as his plays, to deal with situations. This
is to a certain extent detrimental to the
novelist, as it hampers development, and a
novel which does not develop along some
line or other has a tendency to stale or
solidify. But it is obvious that a sense of
situation is one of the first essentials of a
dramatist, and Galsworthy has it in full
measure. It shows pre-eminently in his
central ideas, and subordinately in his apt
management of his curtains, which in his
best plays are situations in themselves,
epitomising the chief issues of the act or
scene.

His central situation is the moral or social
problem at the bottom of the play. He
carries on his propaganda almost entirely
by situation, and this is what lifts his art
above that of Shaw and other missionary
dramatists. He practically never relies
on dialogue for introducing his theories,
except so far as dialogue develops and
explains the situation. He depends on his
19

JOHN GALSWORTHY

characters and their actions to enforce his
moral, and it is to this he owes his artistic
salvation.

Having chosen his situation, he proceeds
to balance it with two contrasting groups,
one on either side. Each group consists of
various types, embodying various points
of view, which, while differing to a slight
extent, are yet subordinate to the Point of
View of the group. The fact that his char-
acters are types rather than individuals is
all to his good as a dramatist, though we
shall see later that it is a drawback in the
novels. Types are always more convincing
on the stage than individuals, the necessary
personal touch being given by the actor.
There is no use criticising a play apart from
the acting — the two are inextricably bound
together, so that the author is in a sense
only the collaborator; a play which was
not written to be acted can scarcely be
called a play — it is a novel in dialogue.

Perhaps the best example of Galsworthy's
technique, and at the same time his finest
20

THE PLAYS

achievement as a playwright, is Strife. Here
we have the central situation, the contrast-
ing of groups, the combination of types —
the whole so perfectly balanced, and so
smooth- working, that it does not creak once.
The central idea is the dispute between the
directors of the Works and their employees,
but it is impossible to consider this in itself,
apart from the attitude of the two parties
towards it. Indeed we are given a very
vague idea of the nature of the difference ;
all we know is that it has reduced many
of the workers to starvation, while the
directors have to face angry shareholders and
failing dividends. Harness, the trades- union
delegate, acts as a go-between, and gradu-
ally both groups begin to see the allurements
of compromise. Various circumstances
drive them towards it, with the exception
of their respective leaders, Roberts, and old
Anthony. The end is pitiful — for the two
sides surrender to each other simultaneously,
breaking their leaders' hearts. These men
are of extraordinary character and ability,
21

JOHN GALSWORTHY

and of the most splendid courage, but they
are betrayed by their cowardly followers,
who have not grit or faith enough to see
that their only chance lies in "no com-
promise." There is a powerful scene be-
tween Roberts, the men's leader, and
Anthony, chairman of the directors, when
they have both been abandoned by their
supporters :

ROBERTS [to ANTHONY]. But ye have not
signed them terms! They can't make
terms without their chairman! Ye would
never sign them terms ! [ANTHONY looks
at him without speaking.'] Don't tell me ye
have ! for the love o' God [with passionate
appeal] I reckoned on ye !

HARNESS [holding out the Directors' copy
of the terms]. The Board has signed.

ROBERTS. Then you're no longer Chair-
man of this Company ! [Breaking into half-
mad laughter.] Ah, ha — Ah, ha, ha !
They've thrown ye over — thrown over their
Chairman : ah — ha — ha ! [With a sudden
dreadful calm.] So — they've done us both
down, Mr Anthony.

22

THE PLAYS

There is also a social problem at the
bottom of Justice, but this time it is in
connection with the English law. In Justice
we have a bitter, tragic indictment of the
penal system. We are given the psychology
of a crime, but not so much of its committal
as of its expiation. We are shown the effect
of prison life on the clerk Falder, and of its
consequences following him after his release,
and driving him at last to suicide. It is
a wonderfully temperate statement of cruel
facts. Throughout it Galsworthy retains
a perfect command of his art; above all
he avoids any cheap identification of the
ministers of a system with the system itself.
The officials of the court and of the prison are
all shown as wise and humane men ; they do
their best, according to their powers, for
those wretches whose lives are harassed by
the system they administrate. It is the
system alone which is in fault.

Perhaps Galsworthy has made a mistake
in choosing Falder as his victim. The man
is of a type which would go under with a

23

JOHN GALSWORTHY

very slight push, weak and changeable,
an extreme case. On the other hand, he
shows the effect of Law on the poor and weak
it is ostensibly there to protect. He is one
of those for whom Justice, as understood
in this country, and indeed most countries,
makes no provision. He is a special case,
and it is characteristic of systems and in-
stitutions that they ignore — are to a certain
extent forced to ignore — the special case,
which is almost always better worth con-
sidering than the general mass to which the
system is adapted. Galsworthy suggests
no remedy, no alternative. He does not
hint anywhere that Falder has been badly
treated. He has been treated as well as
Justice will allow; as many men are the
victims of injustice, so is he the victim of
justice itself.

The play is not quite so well constructed
as Strife. The first and second acts cover
mostly the same ground, and the action is
not so compact or the climax so inevitable.
On the other hand, there are some fine
24

THE PLAYS

scenes, and some particularly arresting
characters. Cokeson, the little kind-hearted,
humble- minded clerk, is a lovable person,
and the relations between Falder and
Kuth Honeywill are studied with exquisite
delicacy and pathos. The scene of Falder' s
arrest, of his trial, and that terrible silent
scene, in which not a word is spoken, but in
which we are shown far more powerfully
than by any words, the horror, the misery,
the madness, of solitary confinement — are
all memorable, and make us forgive a certain
scrappiness in their succession. The play
ends on a fine note of tragedy, when Falder,
re- arrested for obtaining employment by
a forged character, throws himself down-
stairs rather than go back to gaol:

[EuTH drops on her Jcnees by the body.']
EUTH [in a whisper]. What is it ? He's
not breathing. [She crouches over him.]
My dear ! my pretty ! . . . [Leaping to her
feet.] No, no ! No, no ! He's dead.

COKESON [stealing forward, in a hoarse
voice]. There, there, poor dear woman.
25

JOHN GALSWORTHY

[RUTH faces round at him.]

COKESON. No one' 11 touch him now!

Never again! He's safe with gentle Jesus.

[RuTH stands as though turned to stone

in the doorway, staring at COKESON,

who, bending humbly before her, holds

out his hand as one would to a lost dog.~\

Justice and Strife both deal with social and
economic questions in the larger sense, but
in the majority of the plays the issues are
more personal. The Silver Box and The
Eldest Son, for instance, both show the
different standards of morality expected from
the poor and from the rich. The Fugitive
is a study of the helplessness of a beautiful
woman, not specially trained, when she is
driven to make her own way in life. Joy
shows the essential selfishness which we all
bring into our relations both with one
another and with problems of conduct.

The Silver Box runs Strife close as Gals-
worthy's masterpiece. There is a strong
resemblance between its central idea and
that of The Eldest Son, a far inferior play.
26

PLAYS

In The Silver Box the charwoman's husband
is sent to gaol for stealing, whereas the M.P.'s
son, who has also committed a theft, under
far more unforgivable circumstances, escapes
because of his superior position and wealth.
... In The Eldest Son, the poor gamekeeper is
threatened with dismissal if he will not marry
the girl he has betrayed, while the eldest
son of the house brings his father's wrath
upon his head for standing by the lady's
maid he has put in the same position.

The Silver Box is much the clearer- sighted
of the two plays ; in the second the issues
are occasionally confused, and both the
construction and dramatic effect are inferior.
The Silver Box is practically flawless. The
two contrasting groups, the rich and im-
portant Earth wicks, and the poor, good-for-
nothing Joneses, are perfectly balanced.
There is no crude over- emphasis of the situa-
tion, nor inopportune enforcement of the
moral, though perhaps in the trial scene
Galsworthy is a little too anxious to point
out the similarity of the positions of Jack
27

JOHN GALSWORTHY

Barthwick and Jem Jones, and the differ-
ence of their treatment: "Dad! that's
what you said to me ! " says young Barth-
wick, more pointedly than naturally, when
the magistrate tells Jones he is " a nuisance
' to the community."

The characters are drawn with great
vividness and restraint. Mrs Jones is par-
ticularly successful — pale, quiet, down-
trodden, she has about her a certain dignified
pathos which is perfectly human and natural.
She does not pose as a martyr, she does not
pretend that she would not leave her husband
if she could and dared ; the fact is not hidden
from us that her sad- eyed silences must be
particularly irritating to him. She does not
complain over much, but she has nothing of
stoical endurance — she endures rather be-
cause she has been battered into submission
and sees the uselessness of revolt. She
would revolt if she could.

One of the most direct and convincing
scenes in the play is that between these two,
in their home, when Mrs Jones discovers
28

THE PLAYS

that her husband has stolen the silver
box.

JONES. I've had a bit of luck. Picked up
a purse — seven pound and more.

MRS JONES. Oh, James !

JONES. Oh, James ! What about oh,
James ! I picked it up, I tell you. This is
lost property, this is.

MRS JONES. But isn't there a name in it
or something ?

JONES. Name ! No, there ain't no name,
This don't belong to such as 'ave visitin'
cards. This belongs to a perfec' lidy. Tike
an' smell it. Now, you tell me what I
ought to have done. You tell me that.
You can always tell me what I ought to
ha' done.

MRS JONES. I can't say what you ought
to have done, James. Of course the money
wasn't yours; you've taken • somebody
else's money.

JONES. Finding's keeping. I'll take it as
wages for the time I've gone about the
streets asking for what's my rights. I'll
take it for what's overdue, d'ye hear ? I've
got money in my pocket, my girl. Money
in my pocket ! And I'm not going to waste
29

JOHN GALSWORTHY

it. With this 'ere money I'm going to
Canada. I' 11 let you have a pound. You've
often talked of leavin' me. You've often
told me I treat you badly — well I 'ope you'll
be glad when I'm gone.

MRS JONES. You have treated me very
badly, James, and of course I can't prevent
your going ; but I can't tell whether I shall
be glad when you're gone.

JONES. It'll change my luck. I've 'ad
nothing but bad luck since I took up with
you. And you've 'ad no bloomin' picnic.

MRS JONES. Of course it would have been
better for us if we had never met. We
weren't meant for each other. But you're
set against me, that's what you are, and
you have been for a long time. And you
treat me so badly, James, going after that
Eosie and all. You don't ever seem to
think of the children that I've had to bring
into the world, and of all the trouble I've
had to keep them, and what' 11 become of
them when you're gone.

JONES. If you think I want to leave the
little beggars you're bloomin' well mistaken.

MRS JONES. Of course I know you're
fond of them.

JONES. Well then, you stow it, old girl.
30

THE PLAYS

The kids' 11 get along better with you than
when I'm here. If I'd ha' known as much
as I do now, I'd never ha' had one o' them.
What's the use o' bringin' 'em into a state
o' things like this ? It's a crime, that's what
it is ; but you find it out too late ; that's
what's the matter with this 'ere world.

MRS JONES. Of course it would have been
better for them, poor little things; but
they're your own children, and I wonder at
you talkin' like that. I should miss them
dreadfully if I was to lose them.
JONES. And you ain't the only one. If

I make money out there [Looking up he

sees her shaking out his coat — in a changed
voice.] Leave that coat alone !

[The silver box drops from the pocket9
scattering the cigarettes upon the bed.
Taking up the box, she stares at it ;
he rushes at her, and snatches the box
away.]

MRS JONES. Oh, Jem! Oh, Jem!
JONES. You mind what you're savin' !
When I go out I'll take and chuck it in the
water along with that there purse. I 'ad
it when I was in liquor, and for what you
do when you're in liquor you're not respon-
sible— and that's Gawd's truth as you ought
31

JOHN GALSWOETHY

to know. I don't want the thing — I won't
have it. I took it out o' spite. I'm no
thief, I tell you ; and don't you call me one,
or it'll be the worse for you.

MRS JONES. It's Mr Earth wick's ! You've
taken away my reputation. Oh, Jem,
whatever made you ?

JONES. What d'you mean?

MRS JONES. It's been missed ; they think
it's me. Oh, whatever made you do it,
Jem?

JONES. I tell you I was in liquor. I don't
want it ; what's the good of it to me ? If I
were to pawn it they'd only nab me. I'm
no thief. I'm no worse than what young
Barthwick is ; he brought ' ome that purse
I picked up — a lady's purse — 'ad it off 'er in
a row, kept sayin' e'd scored 'er off. Well
I scored 'im off. Tight as an owl 'e was!
And d'you think anything' 11 happen to him ?

MRS JONES. Oh, Jem! It's the bread
out of our mouths.

JONES. Is it, then? I'll make it hot for
'em yet. What about that purse. What
about young Barthwick.

[MRS JONES comes forward to the table,
and tries to take the box; JONES
prevents her.]

32

THE PLAYS

JONES. What do you want with that.
You drop it, I say !

MES JONES. I'll take it back, and tell
them all about it. [She attempts to wrest
the box from Jiiml\

JONES. Ah, would yer ?

[He drops the box, and rushes on her
with a snarl. She slips back past
the bed. He follows ; a chair is over-
turned. . . .]

In The Eldest Son we have the same idea
not quite so effectively handled — the con-
trast between the codes of ethics required
from the poor and from the rich. There
are some good scenes in the play, notably
that between Bill and Freda in the first
act, and that towards the end, when the
whole Cheshire family is brought into action
against Freda and her sturdy old father, who
at last suddenly solves the difficulty by
saying: " I'll have no charity marriage in
my family," and leading his daughter away.
Also the characters of Sir William Cheshire
and of his wife are great achievements,
both strong and delicate. But the play

O 33

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

has not the grip or the reality of The Silver
Box.

The failure lies in a certain lack of
cohesion and inevitableness in the whole.
The rehearsal of Caste, which is introduced
in the second act, points the moral rather
too obviously. Also the central idea is
hampered by the fact that the two illustra-
tive cases are not really parallel. In The
Silver Box the theft by young Barthwick is
just as blameworthy as that by Jones.
Their positions are quite the same, except
that, indeed, it is the man of wealth who is
the more despicable and deserving of punish-
ment. But no one can say that Bill
Cheshire and Freda Studdenham are in
the same position as the gamekeeper and
the village girl. There are objections to the
marriage of Bill and Freda which do not
exist in the other case. Certainly there
are objections to that too, but the fact
remains that the two examples are not
parallel.

34

THE PLAYS
II

THERE are social and economic ideas
at the bottom of The Fugitive,
which is to a certain extent sym-
bolical— a study of woman's position when,
for any reason, she is separated from the
herd. But in this, as in other of his later
plays, Galsworthy's command of his art is
not equal to his enthusiasm for his subject.
Moving and forcible as it all is, it has not
the balance, the inevitableness, of Strife or
The Silver Box. We feel that events are
being arranged to suit the basic theory.
The career of Clare Dedmond, from her
revolt to her downfall, is not a thing fore-
seen, a thing of fate. We feel somehow that
her end is arbitrary — at all events we are not
shown the steps that lead to it. The actual
catastrophes we witness do not demand it.
35

JOHN GALSWORTHY

None the less the study of Clare is arrest-
ing— the woman who is " fine, but not fine
enough." She alienates our sympathies a
little in the first act; there is no denying
that she behaves childishly, and her husband,
uncongenial as he may be, is not quite such
a bounder as Malise, in whom, apparently,
she finds satisfaction. But somehow that
whole first act has an air of unreality about
it, a remoteness from life, and a staginess
we do not expect from Galsworthy. Later
on the movement becomes swifter, and we
have the sense of impending tragedy, which
is realised in the scene where Clare leaves
Malise, though she loves him and he is her
only protector, because she discovers that
she has become a drag on him and is spoiling
his career.

The scene at the Restaurant, too, has its
fine points, thought it is spoilt by a riot of
symbolism and a tendency towards false
sentiment. The continuous singing of " This
Day a Stag must die" by the revellers at
another table is rather an obvious and cheap
36

THE PLAYS

effect, so too the courtesan's kiss as the
curtain falls. On the whole one feels that
The Fugitive is a play in which the author's
plan has been better conceived than carried
out.

The central situations of Joy and of The
Mob have nothing to do with any social or
economic problem, even in a narrowed,
personal sense. They deal with conduct,
and special cases of conduct. Joy and The
Mob, with A Bit o' Love, stand at the bottom
of the scale at the top of which are Justice
and Strife. The interest of the two latter is
centred in the social and industrial problems
they are built on; then come The Silver
Box, The Eldest Son, and The Fugitive, in
which the social problem undoubtedly exists,
but which depend for interest on its personal
variations; then come Joy, The Mob, and
A Bit o' Love, in which the interest is purely
personal and unconnected with any social
idea.

Joy is a play built round an attitude rather
than a problem. " A Play on the Letter I"
37

JOHN GALSWORTHY

is the sub- title, and from first to last we see
how the consideration of self is the govern-
ing motive of widely different characters.
We see it working openly, in characters
that are frankly and aggressively egotistic ;
we see it acting more subtly in characters
of a different stamp. The one person who
is free from it is the old governess, Miss
Beech, who lives only in her interest in
those around her. Somehow, as is often the
case with characters purposely in contrast
with his general scheme, Galsworthy is
occasionally artificial in dealing with Miss
Beech. Her " devilishness " is more than
once a trifle forced — the author so obviously
wants her to be original, unlike both the
conventional stage governess, and the con-
ventionally selfless person. She fills to a
certain extent the position of Chorus, and
her vocation takes from her humanity.
She becomes, as the play goes on, more and
more of a Voice.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of
humanity about Joy herself and her mother.
38

THE PLAYS

Mrs Gwyn's lover, Maurice Lever, is also
real enough, though the same cannot always
be said of Joy's Dick. The scenes between
the young people ring true, but the boy
loses reality when away from Joy; he
becomes more a part of stage machinery.

In spite of some languors, the play is
quick- moving and closely knit, and the
author keeps the central situation well in
hand. There are one or two haunting scenes
— the scenes of young love between Joy and
Dick, the scenes of older, sadder love, more
passionate and more disillusioned, between
Mrs Gwyn and Lever — and one particularly
good scene between Mrs Gwyn and Joy,
after the girl has discovered her mother's
secret.

JOY [covering her face]. I'm — I'm
ashamed.

MRS GWYN. I brought you into the world ;
and you say that to me ? Have I been a
bad mother to you ?

JOY. Oh, mother!

MRS GWYN. Ashamed? Am Z to live
39

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

all my life like a dead woman because you're
ashamed? Am I to live like the dead
because you're a child that knows nothing
of life ? . . . D'you think — because I
suffered when you were born and because
I've suffered since with every ache you ever
had, that gives you the right to dictate to
me now ? I've been unhappy enough, and
I shall be unhappy enough in the time to
come. Oh, you untouched things, you're
as hard and cold as iron.

JOY. I would do anything for you, mother.

MRS GWYN. Except — let me live, Joy.
That's the only thing you won't do for me,
I quite understand.

JOY [in a despairing whisper]. But it's
wrong of you — it's wicked.

MRS GWYN. If it's wicked, / shall pay for
it, not you.

JOY. But I want to save you, mother !

MRS GWYN. Save me ? [Breaking into
laughter.]

JOY. I can't bear it that you — if you'll
only — I'll never leave you ... oh, mother !
I feel — I feel so awful — as if everybody knew.

MRS GWYN. You think I'm a monster to
hurt you. Ah! yes! You'll understand
better some day..

40

THE PLAYS

JOY [in a sudden burst of excited fear]. I
won't believe it — I — I — can't — you're de-
serting me, mother.
MRS GWYN. Oh, you untouched things !

You

[JoY looks up suddenly, sees her face,

and sinks down on her knees.]
JOY. Mother — it's for me !
MKS GWYN. Ask for my life, Joy — don't
be afraid !

[ JOY turns her face away. MRS GWYN
bends suddenly and touches her
daughter's hair ; JOY shrinks from
that touch, recoiling as if she had
been stung.]

MRS GWYN. I forgot — I'm deserting you.

[And swiftly without looking back she

goes away. JOY left alone under the

hollow tree crouches .lower ', and her

shoulders shake.]

The Mob is rather an irritating, unsatis-
factory play. It is meant to be a study in
ideals, but it is astonishing how blunderingly
and at the same time how coldly Galsworthy
puts these ideals before us. The title is also
a mistake. The attitude of the mob towards
41

JOHN GALSWORTHY

Stephen More is merely of secondary and
artificial importance. He meets his death
at its hands, it is true, but it plays little
part in the spiritual fight he wages. The
exhibition, in a final tableau, of its changing
fancy — in the statue it erects to his memory
— is dangerously near anti- climax, and no
integral part of the whole. One cannot see
that the mob is anywhere a dominant force
— it is an incident, far less important here
than in Strife, though there is one scene in
which Galsworthy shows again, as he showed
in Strife, his power of dealing with stage
crowds :

[MoEE turns and mounts the steps.]
TALL YOUTH. You blasted traitor.
[MoKE/oces round at the volley of jeering
that follows; the chorus of booing
swells, then gradually dies, as if they
realised that they were spoiling their
own sport.]

A ROUGH GIRL. Don't frighten the poor
feller.

[A girl beside her utters a shrill laugh.]
MOEE. Well, what do you want?

42

THE PLAYS

VOICE. A speech.
MORE. Indeed ! That's new.
BOUGH VOICE. Look at his white liver.
You can see it in his face.
A BIG NAVVY. Shut it. Give'imachanst.
TALL YOUTH. Silence for the blasted
traitor ?

[A youth plays on the concertina ; there
is laughter, then an abrupt silence.}

. . . and so on.

The whole of this scene is vigorous and
convincing, so too the scene of More's death ; .
but again and again we are irritated by the
way Galsworthy misses his chances. Take,
for instance, the scene in which Katherine
uses her beauty and his love for her to tempt
More from his ideal — it is full of magnificent
opportunities, and there is some fine stuff
in it, but somehow it misses fire. This may
be partly due to the fact that in his later
plays Galsworthy's restraint occasionally
seems to lose its force. Economy of words
and emotion is effective only when used to
control the riches of both.
43

JOHN GALSWOETHY

A Bit o' Love is in a sense the most personal
of all the plays — I say in a sense, because,
for the first time, we find Galsworthy de-
finitely exploiting Place. The importance
of Place in literature is a comparatively
new discovery, for we must not count the
descriptive and local novels which have been
with us more or less from the first. Studies
in Place, which set out deliberately to bring
forward the personality — if I may use the
term — of Place, are only just beginning, and
Galsworthy, with A Bit o9 Love , comes among
the pioneers. It is his latest play, and it
will be interesting to watch if he chooses to
develop along this line.

We have the Devonshire village as a
central character in the piece — the various
types which compose it are just so many
parts of the whole, and it would be a mistake
to treat them as separate persons. The
village is at once sturdy and sweet and
foolish, it is curious, it is pig-headed — it is
built of the wisps of moon-and-dew cobwebs,
and of the sty-door stakes from which they
44

THE PLAYS

float. It is the common life of the village
which is dealt with here, rather than
subtleties of atmosphere — the actual locality
has no definite existence apart from its
inhabitants, which is a milder practice of the
art of Place. But the central idea is the
same as in all Place studies — the effect of
the Place on the Man.

The man here is Michael Strangway,
curate of the village, " a gentle creature
burnt within," who plays the flute, and
loves dumb animals, and acts St Francis
without the adorable Franciscan coarseness.
His wife pleads with him not to ruin her
lover's career by bringing a divorce, and
for love of her he promises. Unfortunately
the interview is overheard by a little gossip-
ing village girl who has a grudge against
him because he had set free her imprisoned
skylark. The news is spread, and the
village is righteously indignant, wrath
culminating when the curate crowns his
impious toleration by falling upon the man
who has used a few plain words about his
45

JOHN GALSWORTHY

wife in a public-house. Attacked and
shunned on all sides for his attempt at a
literal gospel, and betrayed within by the
ache and emptiness of his heart, the curate
resolves on suicide, but is rather tritely
saved at the last moment by the little
che-ild of such occasions, who offers him
" a bit o' love."

There is some good work in the play, an
atmosphere of beautiful wistfulness, tenderly
combined with the bumpkin clump and flit.
The dance in the big barn has its full effect
of mystic and rustic beauty; there is in-
finite pathos in Strangway and Cremer
setting out for a long tramp together in the
link of their bruised hearts — and Galsworthy
has done nothing more kindly-humorous
than the meeting at the village inn; with Sol
Potter uneasily in the chair.

The play is beautifully written, but it
would seem as if the author had scarcely a
clear idea himself of Strangway, and a little
more planning might have saved him
from one or two banalities. The extreme
46

THE PLAYS

individuality, so to speak, of the curate's
problem — for no one can deny that his was
an exceptional case — is a bit in the way of
a writer whose chief concern is the social
and general. But we must give a particular
welcome to A Bit o' Love, because it is
Galsworthy's first real experiment in Place,
and one has a feeling that here is a grand
new road for him to tread.

There remain two plays, which are called
respectively "A Fantasy" and "An
Allegory "—The Pigeon and The Little
Dream.

The first is a fantasy based on sober facts.
Indeed it would be rightly called a satire.
It is a study — carried through in a spirit of
comedy, in spite of drunkenness, vice,
poverty, and suicide — of three irreclaimables,
and of those who would reclaim them.
Old Timson, the drunkard; Mrs Megan,
born light of love, who even while drowning
thinks of dancing ; Ferrand, the vagabond,
the wanderer of quaint philosophy — they are
a fantastic trio, because the sorrow and
47

JOHN GALSWOETHY

sordidness of their lives is all hazed over by
this half -comic, half -satiric glow in which
their creator chooses to see them. In them-
selves more hopeless and tragic than any of
the characters in Strife or Justice, they raise
smiles instead of tears. It would seem
almost as if the tragedy of the outcast had
stirred in Galsworthy those depths beyond
sorrow, which can find no expression save in
laughter.

Various theorists argue about these three
outcasts, and one good-natured man be-
friends them. Wellwyn is a kindly study,
and his easy methods, however much his
practical little daughter may blame hint,
do more to humanise the poor wretches than
the sterner tactics of Professor Calway or
Sir Thomas Huxton. But as a matter of
fact no generosity will meet the case, no
theory. We can only laugh, and through
laughter learn a little more of pity.

There is some delightful humour in The
Pigeon. As a rule Galsworthy's humour is
too deeply tinged with bitterness to ring
48

THE PLAYS

true ; when it is not embittered it is often
ineffective or trivial, as in Joy or The Eldest
Son. In The Pigeon, however, there are
scenes of genuine humour and fine satire,
both in situation and in dialogue. The vari-
ous conceptions of character too are essenti-
ally humorous, which is seldom, if ever, the
case in the other plays. It is a sharp
stroke which right at the end of the play
avenges the kindly Pigeon whom everyone
has plucked.

CHIEF HUMBLE-MAN [in an attitude of
expectation]. This is the larst of it, sir.
WELLWYN. Oh! Ah! Yes!

[He gives them money ; then something
seems to strike him and he exhibits
certain signs of vexation. Suddenly
he recovers, looks from one to the other,
and then at the tea-things. A faint
smile comes on his face.']
WELLWYN. You can finish the decanter.

[He goes out in haste.']
CHIEF HUMBLE- MAN [clinking the coins].
Third time of arskin' ! April fool ! Not
'arf. Good old Pigeon!
D 49

JOHN GALSWORTHY

SECOND HUMBLE-MAN. 'Uman being, I
call 'im.

CHIEF HUMBLE-MAN [taking three glasses
from the last packing-case, and pouring very
equally into them]. That's right. Tell you
wot, I'd never 'a' touched this unless 'e'd
told me, I wouldn't — not with 'im.

SECOND HUMBLE- MAN. Ditto to that !
This is a bit of orl right ! [Raising his glass.]
Good luck !
THIRD HUMBLE- MAN. Same 'ere !

[Simultaneously they place their lips
smartly against the liquor, and at once
let fall their faces and their glasses. ]
CHIEF HUMBLE- MAN [with great solemnity].
Crikey! Bill! Tea ! . . . Ws got us I
[The stage is blotted dark.]

The Little Dream is rather a bitter allegory
of the adventures of the soul in search of
life and happiness. Seelchen, the little
mountain girl, hears the call of the Wine
Horn, typifying the delights of the town and
the world, and the Cow Horn, typifying
the pleasures of her mountain home, but
there is a strange resemblance in the hard
disillusions they are bound to offer after their
50

THE PLAYS

gifts, and only the lonely Great Horn behind
points to something finer and higher. There
is really not much interest, or indeed, much
originality in the little sketch, but there is
some beautiful language, and Galsworthy
is able to give free rein to his sense of words
and poetic faculty. There is real poetry in
some of the lyrics, and by them, rather than
by his published volume of verse, one judges
him poet as well as playwright.

" 0 flame that treads the marsh of time,

Flitting for ever low,
Where, through the black enchanted slime,

We, desperate, following go —
Untimely fire, we bid thee stay !

Into dark air above,
The golden gipsy thins away —

So has it been with love.

THE NOVELS

r HOUGH undoubtedly Galsworthy
owes his position as an artist and as
a thinking force to his plays, he still
jries considerable weight as both in his
ovels. That his novels have not the value,
whether social or literary, of his plays — that
adeed his position as a novelist is largely
due to his fame as a playwright — does not
ikake away with the fact that he has given
UB some half- dozen novels of standing, which
ave worth consideration in themselves, apart
from anything their author may have done
in other fields.

His lack of complete success n,s a novelist

is partly due to those characteristics which

have made him so successful as a playwright.

r ne drama is a lawful means of propaganda,

he novel is not — Galsworthy's play* gain

52

THE NOVELS

enormously from the social or moral prob-
lems at their base, while the same problems .
have a tendency to constrict or impede the (
development of his novels. A play is de-
pendent mainly on its craft, for this is a
point which lies solely with the author, in
which no actor, however skilful, can help
him; on the other hand, a novel dependa
chiefly on its human interest, and this the
author must supply himself, since he has no
intermediaries to make good where he fails.
There is little doubt that abstract ideas do
not help the human interest of a novel. It
is remarkable how small a part the abstract
plays in the lives of even the most thoughtfi i
of us, and anything in the nature of
problem or an idea, of anything belonging
to the brain rather than to the heart, has a
tendency to destroy the illusion of real life
which it is the chief object of a novelist to
create.

Another reason why Galsworthy is more
successful in his plays than in his novel
is that most good plays are founded on 8'
53

JOHN GALSWORTHY

• situation, most good novels on the develop-
ment of a situation, and development is not a
characteristic of Galsworthy's art/ He likes
to take a situation, examine it from char-
acteristic and conflicting points of view, and
show the effect it has on different lives, but
he never attempts to develop it, to start a
chain of events from it, mould characters
by it. Practically every character in a
Galsworthy novel, with the possible excep-
tion of The Dark Flower, is the same at the
end as at the beginning. This means that
in his novels he is still a playwright as far
as both situation and character are con-
cerned. He develops neither, he never goes
% forward, he goes round. The result is that
; *his novels are mostly plays in novel form, and
they suffer in consequence.

In fact all the drawbacks of the novels
may be said to arise from defects in the
human interest so essential to a novelist.
It is not that Galsworthy does not feel, and
most passionately, for his characters, neither
is it that they are not flesh and blood, nor
54

THE NOVELS

that their stories are not real and moving.
\ It is rather because they are types, not
individuals, and types chosen to fit some
particular situation which has been already
selected. They are never mere pegs or mere
puppets, but somehow there is nothing
creative about them ; they lack the individual
touch which the actor can impart to a char-
acter in a play, but which the author alone
can give in a novel. Also they repeat them-
selves, there is not enough diversity; the
same groups arrange themselves in differ-
ent novels. Of course there are exceptions —
Lord Miltoun in The Patrician, Mr Stone in
Fraternity — but these, on examination, prove
to be only a fining down of the type till it
is almost an individual ; there is no definite
creation.

However, against this defect, which is

due to the intrusion of the playwright into

the novelist's sphere, we must set a wonder-

> ful and seldom- failing craft, which goes far

to justify that intrusion. There are few

novelists with a finer sense of form than

55

JOHN GALSWORTHY

Galsworthy, few with a finer sense of style
— the conciseness of the dramatist teaches
him the need of arrangement and the full
value to be wrung out of a word. In one
point only does the dramatist fail the
novelist, and that, strange to say, is in
dialogue. Again and again the dialogue in
{/ the novels falls flat, or is stilted, or irrelevant
— and it is curious, when we remember how
strong the plays are in this respect.
^ There is a certain inequality about the
seven novels : The Island Pharisees, The Man
of Property, The Country House, Fraternity,
The Patrician, The Dark Flower, and The
Freelands. In every way the first is the
weakest, but, on the other hand, the last
is not the most successful. The finest
are The Man of Property and Fraternity.
Undoubtedly Galsworthy is at his best
when his technique is at its highest pitch
of excellence, and weakest when his sense
of form most fails him. Form is never
used by him to cover defects of interest,
beauty, or reality. Fraternity, which is
56

THE NOVELS

very nearly his masterpiece, almost reaches
technical perfection, while The Island
Pharisees — which is as near as he can go
to writing a thoroughly bad novel — is also
the most faultily constructed.

The Island Pharisees shows perhaps more
than any of the novels the raw edges of his
art. He is burning with indignation at the
self -righteousness of the British middle
classes, and his power as a novelist is as yet
too undeveloped to cope with his zeal as a
reformer. He lacks too that subtlety of
warfare which in the plays and later novels
makes his propaganda so effective and at
the same time is one of his truest safeguards
as an artist — the exposure of a cause out
of the mouth of its own champions. He
attacks crudely — through a series of events
which are not always above the suspicion of
pre- arrangement, through dialogue which
is often manoeuvred and artificial. None
of his characters, except Ferrand, the vaga-
bond, has much of the breath of life, and
over the whole hangs a fog of bitterness
57

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

which is scarcely ever dispelled by those
illuminating phrases and flashes of insight
into his opponents' cause, which elsewhere
make him so appealing.

There is little doubt that if The Island
Pharisees were Galsworthy's average instead
of his low- water mark, his position as a
novelist would be negligible. But his other
novels, without exception, are so superior
in technique, in human interest, in beauty,
and in force, that we cannot consider The
Island Pharisees as anything but the first
uncertain step of one who is feeling his way.
In The Man of Property we have the same
idea — the satire of a class — but it is brought
before us so differently that comparison is
impossible.

The Forsyte family are representatives
of that section of the middle class whose
chief aim is Possession. The Forsytes
possess many things — they possess money,
they possess artistic treasures, houses,
wives, and children, they even possess
talents ; but with them the verb " I have " is
58

THE NOVELS

of more importance than its object. " This
interests me, not in itself, but because it is
mine" — is their motto. In many ways
they are less heartless, less hypocritical
than the country Pharisees ; the conscious-
ness of possession brings a certain stamina,
a worth and solidarity, which compel admira-
tion. Also Galsworthy has been far more
tolerant in their portrayal. The Forsytes
are human, they are not like the Dennants ;
they are undoubtedly types, even their
differentiations are typical, but they are
types of flesh and blood, not merely of points
of view. There is something in the group-
ing of them too which is impressive. These
six old brothers whose god is propei
a certain greatness ; though they ai
lust of possession are satirised
telling episodes, we feel that
the nation would do badly with4pHhem.

The chief representative w Forsytism

belongs, however, to one o^the younger

branches of the family. SSmes Forsyte

is essentially the Man of ]J^erty, because

59

JOHN GALSWORTHY

we see the lust of possession working in him
not only through the splendid house he is
building, but through his wife Irene. It is
in his attitude towards Irene that he declares
himself most definitely the Man of Property.
He is not unkind to her, he is not untrue to
her, but she is his in the sense that the Robin
Hill house is his, and it is this realisation
.which fills her with bitterness and loathing.
Irene belongs to the contrasting group
which Galsworthy uses in his novels as in
his plays. She and her lover Bosinney
stand for all that is antagonistic to the
Forsytes. In many ways Irene is one of
Galsworthy's most vivid creations. She is
a type we meet elsewhere in the novels, yet
she has about her certain elements of origin-
ality. Something individual creeps into
the magnetic softness, the passion- haunted
quietness, which are characteristic of so
many Galsworthy women. She is human,
and she is in revolt — but not strenuously or
effectively. Galsworthy has little sympathy
for the strong successful woman, who either
60

THE NOVELS

defeats circumstances or handles them with
capable cunning. In his delineation of
June Forsyte, who belongs to this class, he
is sometimes reluctantly admiring, but never
sympathetic.

June Forsyte, with her decided chin and
managing ways, is the antithesis of Irene,
strong only in her softness. It is easy to
understand how this very contrast would
have switched Bosinney's love from one to
the other, but the change itself is not very
convincingly brought about. Perhaps this
is partly due to the fact that Bosinney
himself is not a success. He is the repre-y
sentative of the contrast group ; property
to him is nothing, he spends his time and
talent — in the end risking his career — on
the house which is Soames Forsyte's. On
the other hand, it is his sudden knowledge
that another also owns the woman of whom
he had thought himself the sole possessor
that drives him to madness and suicide.
Property;' makes its appeal even to him. -

There is throughout the book a depth of
61

JOHN GALSWORTHY

gloom, as if the shadows of great possessions
lay over it. None of the characters is really
t attractive, except, perhaps, old Jolyon
Forsyte ; there is something subtly caddish
about them all, and the author's lack of
sympathy sours the whole. Studied in the
light especially of his novels, it is a strange
error to call Galsworthy " detached." The
side he takes is always apparent, in spite of
; what he says on the other, and his lack of
j sympathy with the human representatives
of the opposite point of view is often so great
as to put them out of drawing. Fine as
the Forsytes are, they would have been much
finer if the author had penetrated in some
degree beneath their outer skin, shown
sympathy with the springs of their nature
as well as understanding of their mental
attitude. His sympathies in The Man of
Property are undoubtedly with Irene Forsyte
and with Bosinney — though it would seem
that this character sometimes repelled and
baffled even his creator.

On the whole there is something haunting
62

THE NOVELS

about the book— something in the gloom of
its ending which makes us shudder after it
is closed. Property triumphs. Bosinney is
beaten and killed by the Man of Property,
and Irene is brought back to the slavery
from which she revolted.

" Huddled in her grey fur against the
sofa- cushions, she had a strange resemblance
to a captive owl, bunched in its soft feathers
against the wires of a cage. The supple
erectness of her figure was gone, as though
she had been broken by cruel exercise ; as
though there were no longer any reason
for being beautiful, and supple, and erect."

Thus the curtain rings down on Irene
Forsyte, crushed under the heel of
prosperity, robbed of her love by a sudden
awakening of the sense of property in the
heart of the man she had thought clean
of it. ...

The Country House also deals with a class,
and it is the country equivalent of the
Forsytes. The Pendyces are big country
63

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

proprietors, but the property is to them a
good deal more than material possession.
It is their Position in the county that they
think of, their Standing; Dignity is with
them almost as important as Land, and more
important than Money. Also they are not
quite so much a type as the Forsytes — in
certain broad characteristics they may be
found in dozens of country manors, but in
others they are unique. They do everything
with the greatest amount of unnecessary
trouble to themselves and other people.
" Pendyce," says Paramor to Vigil, when
discussing the threatened divorce, "he'd
give his eyes for the case not to come on,
but you'll see he'll rub everything up the
wrong way, and it'll be a miracle if we
succeed. That's ' Pendycitis ' ! "

Even George, who in some ways breaks
free from the family tradition, is afflicted
by it. It is largely owing to Pendycitis
that he loses Helen Bellew. He tires her
with that dogged quality of his, which spares
neither himself nor her, but sends him
64

THE NOVELS

plodding and muddling on in the face of
impossible circumstances. He cannot yield,
and he is not really strong — he is a Pendyce ;
and it is with luxurious relief that she finds
herself free of him at last.

Helen Bellew is only lightly sketched
in, her presence is almost always merely
physical. She has many of the outward
essentials of the Galsworthy heroine, that
particular dower of ripe, seductive, yet
delicate, beauty which we find in Irene
Forsyte, Audrey Noel, and Olive Cramier.
But she is heartless — which those others are
not — and hence we seem to find a certain
reluctance on the author's part to probe into
her. What is heartless cannot be truly
beautiful, according to his creed, and he
wants us to realise how beautiful Helen
Bellew was, so that she became a force, a
moulding- stamp, to the hard, unimpression-
able George Pendyce.

The real heroine of The Country House is
George's mother, Margery Pendyce, and she
is, practically without exception, the most

E 65

JOHN GALSWORTHY

charming character in Galsworthy's novels.
She is the Mother — not the Mother in her
elemental form, but the Mother as civilisa-
tion and education and pain have made
her; not very different from the primitive
type, perhaps, but dainty with a score of
sweet refinements. Quieted by her long
subjection in the school of Pendyce, she yet
has the invincible courage of gentleness;
accustomed for years to yield where her own
comfort and happiness only are concerned,
she takes an impregnable stand at last when
her children's welfare is at stake. There is
something heroic in this gentle, soft- gowned,
la vender- scented figure, moving so peace-
fully among her roses, caring so dutifully for
her household and her husband, and then
suddenly putting them all from her, to take
her place beside her outcast son.

" I have gone up to London to be with
George" (she writes simply to Pendyce),
" you will remember what I said last night.
Perhaps you did not quite realise that I
meant it. Take care of poor old Roy, and
66

THE NOVELS

don't let them give him too much meat this
hot weather. Jackman knows better than
Ellis how to manage the roses. Please do
not worry about me. Good-bye, dear
Horace ; I am sorry if I grieve you."

Margery Pendyce is the chief of the con-
trast group in this novel; with her is
Gregory Vigil, the idealist, who looks at the
sky when it would be better if he looked at
the street and saw where he was going.
Unselfishness, quietness, and idealism are
the contrasts of Pendycitis. The Reverend
Hussell Barter, who is a kind of clerical
Pendyce, is one of Galsworthy's most success-
ful attempts at humour. He is drawn with
many a memorable satiric flick, and doubt-
less this is a reason why he succeeds, for
Galsworthy's humour without irony is apt
to be trivial.

Another striking character is the Spaniel
John — here Galsworthy has succeeded in
giving a dog a very definite personality.
John is not only a dog, he is a spaniel — the
distinct psychology of the spaniel works in
67

JOHN GALSWORTHY

him, and we could never think of him as a
terrier or a collie. Indeed the author has
taken as much trouble over the Spaniel
John as over any character in the book, and
been as successful

68

THE NOVELS
II

ONE can say without much fear of
contradiction that after The Man
of Property the finest of Gals-
worthy's novels is Fraternity. Indeed it
comes as near being a perfect work of
art as any novel ever written. There
have been many novels with a stronger
appeal, a wider comprehension, a greater
depth and force, but few of which it can
be said that they fulfil more completely the
canons of novel- writing. And this is to be
understood not only of the letter but of the
^spirit — Fraternity is no mere triumph of
technique, it is a moving, human and beauti-
ful story, about people who are real, if
drawn in pale colours, and situations which
are L;: in spite of their elusiveness.
In iv perfection of balance, Fraternity

JOHN GALSWOETHY

reminds one of the plays. There is a central
situation, flanked by two contrasting groups.
It is not of mere industrial or moral signi-
ficance, nor is it the satirisation of any
particular class ; it is a problem which has

4.- always occupied human minds, and will do
so till the end of time — the problem of the

\/rich and the poor. It is embodied in old
Mr Stone, with his great unfinished — and,
we suspect, ever to be unfinished — work on
Brotherhood. " Each one of us has a shadow
in those places — in those streets." Mr
Stone is one of Galsworthy's finest achieve-
ments. In him the author shows what few
have even attempted to show, the infinite
pathos of moral greatness. There is no
denying the greatness of Mr Stone, in spite
of his mental kink, and his pathos is as
evident. He is alone, 'it is his own doing;
he cannot, if he would, bind himself up with
others. He writes of Fraternity, but in
life he never touches a brother's hand — he
does nothing to unite those two brothers
whose embrace he writes of, and as own
70

THE NOVELS

life is equally remote from either. They
come near him, they put out tentative,
appealing hands — and with a wistful sigh
he turns to his book.

The Classes are represented by the two
Dallison families, the Masses by the Hughes,
Creed, and the little model. It is remarkable
how tightly the whole fabric is drawn
together— Hilary and Stephen Dallison have
married two sisters, Bianca and Cecilia, and
their Shadows live together under the same
roof. We know what would be, with an
average novelist, the result of such an effort
at concentration, but nothing could be
more natural, more inevitable, than the
knitting up of these groups.

The little model is not a common Gals-
worthy type ; in fact, she stands almost
alone in his novels. Quiet and soft she un-
doubtedly is, like most of his women, but
the meek vulgarity of her little mind is some-
thing new. She is drawn with a wonderful
sympathy, as indeed are all the characters
in the book ; for in Fraternity, Galsworthy
71

JOHN GALSWORTHY

does not seem to have been so much struck
by the irony of his theme as by its pathos.
There is one beautiful account of her, leav-
ing Hilary's house, which sheds a tender
light like a spring sunset over her figure,
making it at once terribly pathetic and
terribly young.

" She kept turning her face back as she
went down the path, as though to show her
gratitude. And presently, looking up from
his manuscript, he saw her face still at
the railings, peering through a lilac bush.
Suddenly she skipped, like a child let out
of school. Hilary got up, perturbed. The
sight of that skipping was like the rays of a
lantern turned on the dark street of another
human being's life. It revealed, as in a
flash, the loneliness of this child, without
money and without friends, in the midst of
this great town."

The Hughes group is in its units to be

found in many of Galsworthy's works: the

bullying husband, gross, selfish, an animal —

but an animal broken — the meek wife who

72

THE NOVELS

complains and nags, but has at the bottom
of her heart an unreasoning dog- like quality
which will let her make no effective efforts
for freedom; the poor old man, fallen on
evil days, yet with a philosophy, and a self-
respect which is almost pride. Galsworthy
never sees the poor and outcast in an aureole
of false idealism. If he sadly confesses that
the classes do not know how to help the
masses, he also confesses that the masses
do not know how to help themselves. If
the Dallisons are timid and inefficient,
Hughes is an undeserving brute, and Mrs
Hughes a scold who is largely responsible
for her own ills. The little model is forlorn,
but she is also designing. The result is that
an atmosphere of deep depression hangs over
Fraternity. One might say that its moral
was " For rich is rich and poor is poor, and
never the twain shall meet " — except in the
unfinished book of a cranky idealist.

" Like flies caught among the impalpable
and smoky threads of cobwebs, so men
73

JOHN GALSWORTHY

struggle in the webs of their own natures,
giving here a start, there a pitiful small
jerking, long sustained, and falling into
stillness. Enmeshed they were born, en-
meshed they die, fighting according to their
strength to the end ; to fight in the hope of
freedom, their joy; to die, not knowing
they are beaten, their reward."

The Patrician is scarcely equal to Frater-
nity. In it the bitterness, which seemed to
have slumbered for a while, awakes, and
helps to distort the picture. Also in no
novel, I think, is more obvious Galsworthy's
lack of sympathy with certain of his char-
acters. The book suffers in having for its
central figure a man whom the author ad-
mires but does not really understand. Lord
Miltoun is a noble conception, but Galsworthy
does not get to the bottom of his struggle.
One feels all the way through that he ad-
mires him, but cannot sympathise with him,
and the result is that the real grounds of
Miltoun' s actions are seldom displayed.
We never penetrate beneath the surface of
74

THE NOVELS

this character, whose inner mind we never-
theless would know rather than many
whose workings are shown us.

There is also a group, the Valleys group,
whom Galsworthy is passionately wanting
to treat fairly, but for whom he cannot con-
ceal a bitterness not unfavoured with con-
tempt. Lord Valleys, his wife, his sons, his
daughters, are drawn with a painstaking
effort to hide his real feeling towards them,
but the effort often breaks down; even
Barbara, splendid and brave, has a repelling
hardness in which stick one or two ironic
arrows of her creator. Courtier, who re-
presents the Other Point of View, is some-
times rather vaguely drawn, and suffers
in the opposite way to Miltoun, for Gals-
worthy, while apparently sympathising with
his attitude, does not seem to have the same
admiration for his character.

The only person in the book who is both

admired and understood is Mrs Noel. Here

we have a very appealing figure, tragic yet

quiet, courageous yet soft, made for love,

75

JOHN GALSWOETHY

vibrant with passion, full of an infinite
delicacy and self-respect. Self-respect is
an unfailing characteristic of Galsworthy's
good women ; he has no sympathy with the
woman who in times of stress loses her
personal dignity, and forgets all those little
trivial refinements of body which are part
of her greatness. Audrey Noel " incorrig-
ibly loved to look as charming as she could ;
and even if no one were going to see her, she
never felt that she looked charming enough."
He realises that for a woman who respects
herself it is not enough to be merely clean
and tidy, she must be as beautiful as circum-
stances will allow — it is not vanity but her
dignity which demands it. Mrs Noel ap-
peals because her courage is so infinite, and
because it is so essentially a woman' s courage,
a thing of gentleness and soft endurance,
not of the stiff but of the smiling lip.

There is a certain unsatisfactoriness in

the tragedy of her relations with Miltoun.

He falls from his ideal, but only half-way,

so to speak — the rest of his difficulty is

76

THE NOVELS

solved by her abnegation. One is given
the impression, in spite of much talking
between the characters, that the vital heart
of the matter has never been reached. " If
the lark's song means nothing — if that sky
is a morass of our invention — if we are
pettily creeping on, furthering nothing —
persuade me of it, and I'll bless you." That
desperate cry of Miltoun seems to give
more of the essence of his struggle than any
arguments about Keligion and Authority.
One feels that both were only names on
lips — it was not merely a respect for
authority that made Miltoun first deny him-
self Audrey, and then when he had taken
her, believe himself bound to throw aside
his public life. The appeal of Authority is
not made convincing enough, the appeal to
Keligion not spiritual enough, for a man of
Miltoun' s type — one sees him acting, gener-
ally at least, according to the dead letter
of both ; one knows there must have been
a quickening spirit behind to drive such a
man, but one is not shown it.
77

JOHN GALSWORTHY

The Dark Flower is in some ways a
departure from his usual methods. It
lacks the central problem, with its balanced
and contrasted groups. It is not a study
of a situation nor of a class ; it is a study
of passion. There has always been plenty of
passion in Galsworthy's books; he is not
a cold writer, and though his central idea
is often social or intellectual, in his treat-
ment of it he never loses sight of the fact
that human emotions are stronger than
human intellects, and play a more im-
portant part in all situations, no matter
how purely technical and general these may
appear. But in The Dark Flower, passion is
not an incident or a moulding force, it is
the central theme. We are shown its growth
in three different stages — its first kindling
in the heart of a boy, its consummation in
the young man and woman, its last flicker
in the man who sees old age approaching
and to whom youth calls.

To carry out his idea Galsworthy is forced
to put aside much of that compactness which
78

THE NOVELS

is so effective in his other novels. Indeed
The Dark Flower is really three separate
stories, of which the hero, Mark Lennan, is
the connecting link. A really fine character
might have held these three episodes to-
gether, but Lennan is vaguely drawn. He
is most convincing as boy and middle-aged
man ; in the central part he is swamped in
the vehemence of his own love. Indeed
the passion of Lennan and Olive Cramier
is far the greatest thing about them — taken
apart from it they are both a little colourless.
Olive is much less life-like than Audrey Noel,
Irene Forsyte, and others of her kind ; she
is vague and shadowy beside the heroines of
the two other episodes, Anne Stormer and
Nell Dromore.

These women are in many ways the
best-drawn characters in the book. Anne
Stormer, caught on the fringe of middle age
by the gust of her passion for a boy of
eighteen, swept by it, rocked by it, but con-
scious all the time of its hopelessness with
regard to herself, its cruelty with regard to
79

JOHN GALSWOBTHY

him, in the end gives him up to the little
girl of his own age, with whom he climbs
trees, and in whose presence he forgets the
dark flower whose scent in her bosom had
given him his first staggering draught of life.
She is a character fine through her pathos,
through the inevitableness of her renuncia-
tion, which is not made from any high
spirit of courage or self-sacrifice, but simply
because she must.

Very different is Nell Dromore, who sends
the mocking cry of youth after Lennan when,
having passed through the storm of his love
for Olive Cramier, and married his boyhood's
playfellow, Sylvia Doone, he sees old age
creeping towards him, passionless and ad-
ventureless. She is an extraordinary study
of mingled abandonment and innocence.
She leads him on by methods which would
not disgrace a courtesan if they had not
about them all the delicious shamelessness
of a child. In the end he has the strength
to wrench himself from her, knowing that
she brings him but a false hope, for which his

80

THE NOVELS

wife's broken heart must pay. Sylvia,
though winning and sweet in the first episode,
is rather shadowy here, where she has such
an important part. No doubt her in-
effectiveness is to a certain extent deliberate,
but for all that it should not be unreal, or
we lose sight of it as a force in Lennan's
struggle.

On the whole it must be said that Gals-
worthy is at his best when most character-
istic, and here, where he turns to the methods
of the more ordinary novelist, he loses some
of his strength. There are, however, some
impressive scenes in the book, and he has
again shown his peculiar successfulness in
dealing with youth and young love. There
are delightful pictures of the boy Mark, in
which his growing, half -understood infatua-
tion is never allowed to drown the frankness
of his youth ; and the scenes between him
and Sylvia remind us of similar scenes in Joy.

In The Fredands, Galsworthy reverts
to the more characteristic mood; indeed
the book is reminiscent — in a stimulating,
F 81

JOHN GALSWORTHY

legitimate way. Its structure reminds one
of The Man of Property, and its environment
of The Country House. As in the first of
these the web was spun over the framework
of the six brothers Forsyte, so here we have
the four brothers Freeland to serve as pegs
— and they live in circumstances that recall
the Pendyces and their problems. Not that
they are all four country people — Felix is a
successful author and lives at Hampstead,
and John is in the Home Office; but the
family meets at Becket, where Stanley, who
has made a fortune by exporting ploughs,
has an estate, and Tod, the eccentric and
revolutionary, lives the simple life, freehold.

Then there is the old mother, one of those
tender, sturdy, odd patricians whom the
author can draw so clearly, and there is the
young genereration as represented by Nedda,
Felix's inquiring daughter, and Tod's
anarchistic Derek and Sheila — also the
wives of three Freelands, especially Tod's
Kirsteen.

These characters are not considered so
82

THE NOVELS

much in relation to each other as in relation
to the central problem, which is The Land —
and The Land with Galsworthy is, of course,
not the good earth but the slaves that toil
on it. He studies the labouring man in
connection with his employers, the petty
tyrannies of Manor, Parsonage, and Farm.
Bob Tryst is evicted because his marriage
with his deceased wife's sister displeases the
Squiress, Lady Malloring, and the poor
Gaunts are hounded from pillar to post
because the daughter has " got into trouble."
Galsworthy pillories Feudalism, which he
sees rampant over English rusticity, and
parts of The Freelands read like a Gladstone
League pamphlet.

However, to any one who loathes "the
People," whether of fields or streets, the cen-
tral interest of The Freelands is Galsworthy's
study of a modern English family. He is
rather fond of this especial study — we have
it in The Man of Property, The Country
House, and The Patrician ; we^ee it hovering
near Fraternity. The combinations and
83

JOHN GALSWORTHY

permutations of blood relationship seem to
interest him. enormously — the modern push
and individualism, half attacking, half com-
bining with old-fashioned ideas of kinship
and unity. He shows how the family Idea
survives, in spite of actual disruptions, and
can outlive even an utter lack of common
life, interest, or sympathy — so that the un-
loved brother must come somehow before
the loved stranger, simply because he is
One of the Family. It is probably a lurking
of the primitive clan instinct, and one would
like to see it treated of even more thoroughly
than Galsworthy has done. It is interesting
to watch him with these Freelands, linked
by their family tie, and also, in this case, by
the wise, kindly, foolish old mother of them
all — who is, however, Tod's in particular,

In other matters The Freelands makes its
predecessor, The Dark Flower, stand out
even more as an exception or parenthesis.
In his latest novel we have all his early,
usual traits: all his old defects of too
general a characterisation, too careful a
84

THE NOVELS

balance, too deliberate a sasrififce. °f
artist to the ,niQr§list, but at the same time
the virtues of these defects — restraint, craft,
and purpose, and, besides, those intrinsic
qualities which are the real building-stuff
of his work.

The characters of these four brothers,
their wives and children and associates, are
drawn with a firm touch lightened by much
satire of the kinder sort. There is that sense
and grasp of beauty which we find so in-
evitably in Galsworthy's treatment of even
the stuffiest theme. We have, too, a sense
of aloofness which, if it is sometimes irritat-
ing, is occasionally majestic, and lit by
warm, sudden flashes of penetration into
characters one would have thought, by other
signs, to be beyond his sphere of understand-
ing. The book may not be so good as
Fraternity, it is certainly not so great as
The Man of Property, but it is, nevertheless,
among the best he has given us, which is
encouraging, since it is, though only tempor-
arily, one hopes, the last.
85

THE SKETCHES

TT71LLA RUBEIN and four short
I/ stories under the title of A Man
of Devon were published anony-
mously. All early efforts, they are not on a
line with Galsworthy's later work, but they
have about them a certain beauty and in-
dividuality which makes them worth con-
sidering. Perhaps their chief characteristic
is delicacy : they are water-colours, in many
ways exquisitely conceived and shaded, but
perhaps a trifle pale and washed out, a trifle
— it must be owned — uninteresting.

Villa Rubein, describing with much sensi-
tive charm the life of a half- Austrian house-
hold, is full of tenderness, but lacking some-
how in grip. The characters are more
attractive than most of Galsworthy's — in
fact, in no work of his do we meet such a
uniformly charming group of people. They
86

THE SKETCHES

are sketched, even the less pleasing, with an
entire absence of bitterness, and the heroine,
Christian, and her little half- German sister
are delightful in their freshness and grave
sweetness. Miss Naylor and old Nic Treffry
are also drawn with a loving and convincing
hand. The book seems to have been written
in a mellow mood which passed with it.
Yet we pay for any absence of bitterness,
propaganda or pessimism, by a correspond-
ing lack of force. It must be confessed that
Galsworthy is most effective when he is
most gloomy, most penetrating when he
Is most bitter, most humorous when he
is most satirical.

The short stories call for no special com-
ment except The Salvation of a Forsyte, where
we meet for the first time Swithin Forsyte,
later to figure in The Man of Property. We
are introduced to an early adventure of his,
which is treated with some technical skill
and an impressive irony. The tale has
grip, and is not far ofi French excellence
of craft. The other stories are too long for
87

JOHN GALSWORTHY

their themes, which, if not actually thin in
themselves, are dragged out in the telling.

Of very different stuff are the four
volumes of sketches — A Commentary, A
Motley, The Inn of Tranquillity, and The
Little Man. In these, except, perhaps, in
the last, we have some of Galsworthy's best
work, much of it equal, in its different way,
to the finest of the plays and novels.

A Commentary deals chiefly with the life
of the very poor, showing the intimacy of
the author's knowledge, and the depths of
his sympathy. Some of the sketches are
indictments of the social order which favours
those who have money and tramples those
who have none. Justice, for instance, is a
fresh exposure of the oft- exposed inequality
of the divorce laws where rich and poor are
concerned. A Mother is a piteous revelation
of those depths of horror and humiliation
which form the daily life of many. Con-
tinually, in the plays and in the novels,
Galsworthy reveals the utter brutishness of
some of these submerged ones. He never
88

THE SKETCHES

attempts to enforce his social ethics by
glorification of those he champions. Such
men as Hughes, in Fraternity, or the husband,
in A Mother, are absolutely of the lowest stuff
and, it would seem, unworthy of a hand to
help them out of the mud in which they roll.
But here lies the subtlety of the reproach —
it is the social system with its cruelties and
stupidities which is responsible for this.
There is something more forceful than all
the sufferings of the deserving in this grim
picture of utter degradation, the depths of
bestialism into which mismanaged civilisa-
tion can grind divine souls.

In other of the sketches we are shown the
opposite side of the picture — the selfishness
of the prosperous, their lack of ideals and
imagination. Now Galsworthy becomes
bitter ; with a steely hardness he describes
the comfortable life of the upper middle
classes, of the fashionable and wealthy.
The bias of A Commentary is obvious
throughout, and throughout propaganda
takes the first place. The fragments are held
80

JOHN GALSWORTHY

together by the central idea, which is the
exposure — ironic, indignant, embittered, in-
finitely pitying — of the inequalities between
the poor and the rich. True, there is atmos-
phere, style, a sense of character; but in
A Commentary the artist takes second place.
A Motley is, as the title implies, a collec-
tion linked up by no central view- point.
Character sketches, episodes of the streets
and of the fields, reflections on life, art,
manners, anything, and all widely different
in style and length, crowd together between
the covers, without any definite scheme.
They show extraordinary powers of observa-
tion and intuition, and at the same time a
certain lack^grip, which is always the first
of Galsworthy's weaknesses to come to light
in a failing situation. Some of the sketches
are too slight, over- fined. On the other
hand, some have true poetry and true pathos
in their conception. The style is more
polished, the pleading less special, the know-
ledge less embittered than in A Commentary.
Particularly successful is A Fisher of Men, in
90

THE SKETCHES

which Galsworthy is at his best, giving us a
sympathetic and tragic picture of a type
with which we know he has little sympathy
—there is no bitterness here, just pathos.
Once More is a study of lower-class life
slightly recalling A Mother, but here again
is far more tenderness, due partly, no doubt,
to the wistfulness of youth that creeps into
the story. Then there are sketches of life
and the furtive love of the London parks;
no one has realised more poignantly than
Galsworthy all the tragedy of hidden meet-
ings and hidden partings with which our
public places are filled.

The Inn of Tranquillity is also a mixed
, collection, and in it we see far more of Gals-

* worthy the poet and the artist than of
Galsworthy the social reformer. There are

• in the book fragments of sheer beauty which
would be hard to beat anywhere in modern
prose. Take, for instance, the painting of
dawn in Wind in the Rocks :

" That god came slowly, stalking across
91

JOHN GALSWORTHY

far over our heads from top to" top ; then,
of a sudden, his flame- white form was seen
standing in a gap of the valley walls ; the
trees flung themselves along the ground
before him, and censers of pine gum began
swinging in the dark aisles, releasing their
perfumed steam. Throughout these happy
ravines where no man lives, he shows himself
naked and unashamed, the colour of pale
honey ; on his golden hair such shining as
one has not elsewhere seen; his eyes like
old wine on fire. And already he had swept
his hand across the invisible strings, for there
had arisen the music of uncurling leaves and
flitting things."

Take also just this sentence from A
Novelist's Allegory : " those pallid gleams
. . . remain suspended like a handful of
daffodils held up against the black stuffs of
secrecy."

Galsworthy allows himself to play with
words, blend them, contrast them, savour
their sweet sound and the roll and suck
of them under the tongue ... he becomes
a poet in prose. But it is not only words
92

THE SKETCHES

that make his poetry. He seizes aspects of
beauty and gives them to us palpitating,
fresh from their capture, a poet's prey. Such
is Riding in Mist, a consummate study of the
misty moor, damp, sweet, and dangerous.
There is, too, a wonderful sense of locality
in That Old-Time Place — it throbs with
atmosphere.

But we have many studies besides of words
and place. There is Memories,, in which
Galsworthy uses his real understanding of
dog- nature, faithful and true. There is The
Grand Jury, in which he shows the fullness
of his sympathy for the human dog, the
bottom dog, so generally and necessarily
ignored by laws which are inevitably made
for the upper layer of humanity. We have,
too, some illuminating comments on the
world of letters. In About Censorship there
is fine irony, and in Some Platitudes Concern-
ing the Drama plenty of illumination. In-
deed, in this article we are given a plain
enough statement of the rules which evi-
dently govern Galsworthy's own work. For
93

JOHN GALSWORTHY

instance : "A good plot is that sure edifice
which slowly rises out of the interplay of
circumstance on temperament and tempera-
ment on circumstance, within the enclosing
atmosphere of an idea." There could be no
clearer definition of the plan governing
Strife and The Silver Box. The pronounce-
ment on dramatic dialogue, too, applies
admirably to much of Galsworthy's own
achievement :

" The art of writing true dramatic
dialogue is an austere art, denying itself
all license, grudging every sentence devoted
to the mere machinery of the play, suppress-
ing all jokes and epigrams severed from
character, relying for fun and pathos on
the fun and tears of life. From start to
finish good dialogue is hand- made, like good
lace ; clear, of fine texture, furthering with
each thread the harmony and strength of a
design to which all must be subordinated."

In his last book of sketches — The Little
Man and other Satires — Galsworthy has made
a deliberate sacrifice of beauty. He has
94

THE SKETCHES

left the luminous Italian backgrounds of
The Inn of Tranquillity, the rustling English
twilights of A Motley, for the midnight lamp
on his study table. This is why, perhaps,
The Little Man depresses me. Galsworthy
has not stood the test — he has grown bitter.
His satire is more akin to that of Swift
than Samuel Butler, but without Swift's
redeeming largeness, his tumbling restless-
ness. Galsworthy's bitterness is the well-
bred bitterness of the pessimist at afternoon
tea; Swift is the pessimist in the tavern,
raging round and breaking pots.

However, an author's point of view is not
a fair subject for criticism, any more than
the shape of his head ; he probably cannot
help it. But it may be deplored.

The most striking thing about the book
itself is the subdivision titled Studies in
Extravagance. Here we have some re-
morseless, if only partial, truth — the fierce
glow of the searchlight, more concentrated
though more limited than the wide shining
of the sun. We have The Writer, The
95

JOHN GALSWORTHY

Housewife, The Plain Man, etc., all pierced
through to their most startling worst.
Galsworthy will make no concessions — he
will not show us a single motherly redeeming
virtue in that woman of schemes and covert
horribleness whom he presents as a possible
variety of British matron. So too with his
Writer — those flickers of amiable naivety
which occasionally humanise the writers
most of us know are shut out from this
portrait of an ape playing with the ABC.
It is clever, fierce, vindictive, and partly true.
There are some gentler sketches in the
book — for instance, the name-piece, in which
we have a really witty and typical picture
of an American, with his God's own gift
of admiring good deeds he will not do him-
self. There is also Abracadabra, in which
the satire is fundamentally tender, and with
little significant bitterness — though in time
one comes to resent Galsworthy's inalienable
idea that every woman is ill-used in marriage.
There is also such genuine wit, terseness,
and point in Hall Marked that one can afford
96

THE SKETCHES

to skip the humours of the parson's trousers.
Ultima Thule is more in The Motley and
Commentary vein. We are glad to meet the
old man who could tame cats and bullfinches.
But why sigh over him so much ? He was
happy and to be envied, even though he
lived in a back room on a few farthings.
This misplaced pity is becoming irritating
in Galsworthy. His earlier works — Strife,
The Man of Property — are innocent of it,
but lately it has grown to be a habit with
him. He cannot resist the temptation to
weep over everyone whose clothes are not
quite as good as his own.

It is scarcely surprising that a writer with
Galsworthy's sense of words and atmosphere
should have written a book of verse — the
only surprise is that his solitary experiment
in poetry should not have been more success-
ful. When we remember the exquisite prose
of his plays, novels and sketches, the ad-
mirable description, the sense of atmosphere,
not forgetting also the genuine poetry of
much of The Little Dream, we are surprised
G 97

JOHN GALSWORTHY

not to find in Moods, Songs and Doggerels,
anything of permanent quality, or worthy
to stand beside his other work. There are
some delightful songs of the country, of
Devon, one or two little fragrant snatches,
like puffs of breeze. But the more ambitious
pieces, the Moods, are for the most part
wanting in inspiration. They are just prose,
and not nearly such fine prose as we have a
right to expect from Galsworthy. One or
two stand out as poetry, and these are
mostly studies in atmosphere, such as
Street Lamps :

Lamps, lamps! Lamps ev'ry where
You wistful, gay, and burning eyes,
You stars low- driven from the skies
Down on the rainy air.

You merchant eyes, that never tire
Of spying out our little ways ;
Of summing up our little days
In ledgerings of fire —

98

THE SKETCHES

Inscrutable your nightly glance,
Your lighting and your snuffing out,
Your nicker through the windy rout,
Guiding this mazy dance.

0 watchful, troubled gaze of gold,
Protecting us upon our beats —
You piteous glamour of the streets,
Youthless, and never old ! "

99

GALSWOBTHY THE ARTIST

I X~"V ALSWORTHY is an artist before he
I ._. is a social reformer. It is a mistake *
^*-££ to consider him chiefly from the
second point of view ^for he is not so much
a thinker spreading his propaganda by
artistic methods as an artist whose excel-
lence is grounded in ideas./ Strife, for in-
stance, was not written to expose the evils
of our present industrial system so much as
from the impulse to create, grounding itself
in an economic problem — which the artist
displays and analyses, just as others, and he
at other times, would display and analyse
any problem of love, manners, life, or human
nature, in the name of " plot."

For this reason his propaganda interferes

very little with his art. Moreover, it is a

general propaganda, which lends itself more

directly to artistic purposes than a particular

100

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST

one. It would be far more difficult, for
instance, to write a human and artistic novel
on the evils of leaded glaze than it would be
to write one on the selfish stupidity of which
leaded glaze is the result. Galsworthy does
not attack, at least in force, any definite
abuses, he attacks those cruel and stupid
powers which are at the bottom of them all —
the love of property for property's sake, the
false respectability of the unassailed, the
lack of comprehension of one class for an-
other, Pharisaism, materialism, selfishness,
and cowardice. He is the champion of the
bottom dog, whether human or animal. He
pleads passionately for sympathy with the
abused and downtrodden and outcast. His
throbbing pity vitalises his propaganda, so
that it not only ceases to constrict his art,
but positively enriches it./

When he is at his best we find a perfect
blending of art and idea. The second is
bound up in the first, an essential part of it.
As he himself says in Some Platitudes con-
cerning Drama : " A drama must be shaped
101

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

so as to have a spire of meaning. Every
grouping of life and character has its inher-
ent moral ; and the business of the drama-
tist is so to pose the group as to bring that
moral poignantly to the light of day."

This ideal is completely fulfilled in Strife
and The Silver Box, also in Fraternity, The

' Man of Property, and some of the sketches
— hence it is in tLese that we must look for
his best work. Now and then the idea

* carries away the artist, warping his vision,
and we have instances of special pleading,
such as Justice, The Fugitive, and The Island
Pharisees.

In a sense Galsworthy's propaganda is a
part of his technical equipment. He uses it
chiefly in laying his bases ; the solidity and
centralisation of his work is due largely to
>• the economic and social ideas on which he
rears the structure of human passion and
frailty. He does not make Shaw's mistake
of using dialogue, rather than situation, as
a means of propaganda, neither does he rely
much on character. His moral is inherent in

102

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST

his situations, and he fails only when he lets
it stray from the basic idea into the super-
structure of character and dialogue.

As an artist pure and simple his chief
assets are a sense of situation, a sense of
atmosphere, and the power of presenting
both beautifully. His sense of character
is not particularly wide or profound. He
deals with types rather than individuals,
and the same types repeat themselves a trifle
monotonously. Though he has great gifts
of intuition, and occasional penetrating
flashes, he does not work much below the
surface. It is astonishing, when one con-
siders the force and passion of so much of
his work, to realise that it is all got from
surf ace- workings — not that he ever suggests
the shallow or superficial, it is simply a
reluctance to dig.

Take, for example, Miltoun, in The Patri-
cian ; here he has attempted to draw a
character whose actions spring from the in-
most recesses of his being, and the result is
a certain unconvincingness marring a fine
103

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

achievement, for Galsworthy can penetrate
only in swift spasms of intuition, and the
delineation of a character like Miltoun's
requires no spasmodic descent, but a per-
petual working in the buried and profound.
/Galsworthy is a psychological analyst of
* some skill; he is sensitive to psychological
variations, but he catches these only in their
exterior manifestations, and t"he result is
not so much a lack of profundity as a lack
of grip. For this reason his characters,
charming as they sometimes are, interesting
as they always are, never succeed in being
absolutely Life — we never come to know
them really intimately, they are more ac-
quaintances than friends./

This surf ace- working in character is liable
to impair situation, since the two are inter-
dependent. Galsworthy is a master of situa-
tion, but occasionally, when the depths ought
to be sounded, we are put off with a con-
summate skill of arrangement, a perfection
of combination and interplay. This is so
splendidly done that it is generally not till
104

GALSWORTHY THE AETIST

afterwards that we realise the lack, and this
only because Galsworthy's work so often
leaves an after- taste of aloofness, that, as
every lover of Galsworthy knows he is not
aloof, one sees that something must be wrong
with the art which gives such an impression.

Critics speak of Galsworthy's detachment, .
but the true lover knows this is not soKM^uie
sense of aloofness is due partly to his scrupu-

4 lous fairness in examining every point of
view, partly to an exaggerated restraint, and
a shrinking from analyses which are not

K purely intellectual. One often wishes that
he would give himself rein. It is not
from lack of power that he holds himself in,
it seems to be rather from a certain shyness,
a fastidious shrinking from troubling the
depths or breaking the gates. On the rare
occasions he gives himself freedom, we are
struck by the force and vitality of it all.

/Strange as it may seem in one who has been j

so often accused of coldness, he is masterly \

in conveying the charged atmosphere of

passion. 7It is true that he writes with

105

JOHN GALSWOETHY

restraint, with almost too much restraint,
but he has a wonderful power of suggesting
the heavy sweetness of passion, its joys,
its languors, its delicacies rather than its
ferocities.

Take, for example, the scene in The Man of
Property, when Irene returns to her husband,
after having for the first time met Bosinney
as a lover :

" He hardly recognised her. She seemed
on fire, so deep and rich the colour of her
cheeks, her eyes, her lips, and of the unusual
blouse she wore. She was breathing fast
and deep, as though she had been running,
and with every breath perfume seemed to
come from her hair, and from her body, like
perfume from anjo^ening flower. ... He
lifted his finger towards her breast, but she
dashed his hand aside. ' Don't touch me ! '
she cried. He caught her wrist; she
wrenched it away. ' And where have you
been ? ' he asked. ' In heaven — out of this
house ! ' With those words she fled upstairs.
. . . And Soames stood motionless. What
prevented him from following her? Was
106

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST

it that, with the eyes of faith, he saw
Bosinney looking down from that high
window in Sloane Street, straining his eyes
for yet another glimpse of Irene's vanished
figure, cooling his flushed face, dreaming of
the moment when she flung herself on his
breast — the scent of her still in the air around
and the sound of her laugh that was like
sob ? "

Next to a sense of situation Galsworthy
must be granted a sense of atmosphere.
This is due to the extraordinary sensitive-
ness he brings into his work, as distinct from
penetration.

" Strong sunlight was falling on that
little London garden, disclosing its native
shadowiness ; streaks and smudges such as
Life smears over the faces of those who
live too consciously. The late perfume of
the lilac came stealing forth into the air
faintly smeethed with chimney- smoke.
There was brightness but no glory, in that
little garden ; scent, but no strong air blown
across golden lakes of buttercups, from seas
of springing clover, or the wind- silver of
107

JOHN GALSWORTHY

young wheat; music, but no full choir of
sound, no hum."

This passage from Fraternity shows Gals-
worthy's peculiar grasp of subtleties, those
pseudo- expressions of emotion in Nature,
which only the sensitive can find in their
less obvious aspects. For the more obvious
aspects, he has not so much attention. He
deals little with storms and furies, with
nature as a power. Nature to him is rather
an influence, a thing of crafty workings;
and he loves above all others hours of pale
sunlight, faint dawn, or, more still, twi-
light languid and hushed, full of troubled
perfumes :

" All things waited. The creatures of
night were slow to come forth after that
long bright summer's day, watching for the
shades of the trees to sink deeper and deeper
into the now chalk- white water; watching
for the chalk- white face of the sky to be
masked with velvet. The very black plumed
trees themselves seemed to wait in suspense
for the grape- bloom of night. All things
108

GALSWOKTHY THE AKTIST

stared, wan in that hour of passing day — all
things had eyes wistful and unblessed." l

In__thgjnatter of style, Galsworthy is not \
a purist. One finds a split infinitive spoiling k**"
a procession of beautiful words, and one
occasionally loses patience over a squad of
panting verbless sentences all beginning with
" And." But he has a gift worth more than
grammatical perfection, and that is a real
sense of words* In their combinations, con-
trasts, and values, he marshals them with
a poet's strategy. He loves those words
which hold their meanings as soldiers
their weapons; one sees him apportioning
the place of honour in a sentence, ranking
the subordinates. He is so absolute a crafts-
man that we see in his occasional lapses more
of a deliberate disregard than ignorance, and
certainly nothing of the slipshod.

His dialogue in'ihe plays is masterly — not
always so effective in the novels. He is at
his best in the dialogue of the lower classes.

1 The Dark Floiver.
109

JOHN GALSWOETHY

Sometimes, even in the plays, the conversa-
tion of his " gentlefolk" is apt to be stilted
or to drag. On the other hand, the speech
of the poor is always both spontaneous and
significant. He has a wonderful power of
economy in words. Throughout the plays,
and in the most memorable dialogues in the
novels, there is not a word too much, and
yet there is nothing jerky or scrappy in the
general impression.

Galsworthy is not a writer who owes much
to outside influence. The first thought of
" influence " in his case calls up ideas of
French and Russian literature, but it would
be surer to say that the resemblance is due
to French and Russian qualities in the
author's outlook and state of mind than to
discipleship either unconscious or deliberate.

Certainly he has that infinite pity, almost
reverence, for suffering which characterises
Russian ideas. But the same pity and
reverence are not expressed in the large,
straightforward manner of Tolstoy or
Dostoevsky, but with Gallic subtlety and
110

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST

irony, recalling Flaubert. The writer with
whom he has greatest affinity, to whom
he may be said to be to a certain extent
indebted, is Turguenev. In Turguenev we
see the meeting ground of French and
Russian art. There is the breadth, the
tenderness, the mysticism of the Slav,
mingling with the Frenchman's sense of
humour and sense of form. Every writer
who sets store on form must expect to be
credited with French influences. English
art is essentially naive in technique. Gals-
worthy has few, if any, English affinities.
But, on the other hand, he has anglicised
the foreign influences. The Russian pity is
shorn of its mysticism, the French irony
of its gaiety. These two combinations are
characteristic of the countries of their origin,
and Galsworthy splits them, choosing the
pity and the irony, leaving the mysticism
and the gaiety — thus asserting both his
personality and his race.

Galsworthy is a pessimist — not in the
spirit of fire and revolt, but in the spirit of
111

JOHN GALSWOETHY

an artist, sad, rather hopeless, and com-
passionate. Everywhere he sees ills — the
trampling of the weak and poor, the conflict
of instinct and civilisation, the pariahdom
of the enlightened, the tyranny of un-
imaginativeness, hypocrisy and greed. He
suggests no remedy — in fact, he insists con-
tinually on the difficulty of finding any
remedy which shall be at once permanent
and adequate — he just exposes the sore, and
shows at the same time his burning pity for
it, kindling our own.

But if he realises with painful vividness
the evil and sorrow of life, and if a certain
tired hopelessness and dislike of interference
keep him from dreaming a brighter future,
his eyes are not blind to beauty, to tender-
ness, and charm. /Though his fine char-
acters are almost always in revolt, though his
beauty is always softened with pathos, his
rare humour twisted with satire, we must
acknowledge that he has a true sense of the
splendour, the loveliness, and the fun of
life. He sees them, so to speak, through a
112

GALSWORTHY THE AETIST

mist of tears, but he does not miss them
altogether. It is because he is so much
more than a social reformer, because he is an
artist and a sensitive, that he cannot glibly
set down remedies for the world's wrongs.
The genuine reformer is never content with
pointing out the evils of a system, he has an
improving plan. Galsworthy only shows
us the shadows, with the lights that lie
beside them, not those lights which shall
scatter them at last. He is an artist, and
the artist's vision is not of the future, but
of to-dayy

H 113

A SHOET BIBLIOGRAPHY OF
JOHN GALSWORTHY'S PRIN-
CIPAL WRITINGS

[The date is given of the first edition of each book. " New
edition" signifies a revision of text, change of format or
transference to a different publisher.]

* From the Four Winds [stories] (Unwin). 1897.

* Jocelyn (Duckworth). 1 898.

* Villa Eubein (Duckworth). 1900.

* A Man of Devon [and other stories] (Blackwood).

1901.
The Island Pharisees (Heinemann). 1904. New

edition, 1908.
The Man of Property (Heinemann). 1906. New

editions: 1907. (Hodder and Stoughton). 1911.

(Heinemann). 1915.
The Country House (Heinemann). 1907. New edition,

1911.
A Commentary (Richards). 1908. New edition

(Duckworth). 1910.
Fraternity (Heinemann). 1908.
Plays. Volume I. [The Silver Box ; Joy ; Strife]

(Duckworth). 1909.

* These four books were written under the pseudonym
"JohnSinjohn."

115

JOHN GALSWOKTHY

Villa Rubein [and other stories] (Duckworth). 1909.

New edition, 1911. [This contains the stories

previously issued in the two volumes enumerated

above, "Villa Rubein " and "A Man of

Devon."]

The Silver Box [separate issue] (Duckworth). 1910.
Joy [separate issue] (Duckworth). 1910.
Strife [separate issue] (Duckworth). 1910.
Justice [play] (Duckworth). 1910.
A Motley (Heinemann). 1910.
The Patrician (Heinemann). 1911.
The Little Dream [play] (Duckworth). N.D. [1911.]
The Pigeon [play] (Duckworth). 1912.
Moods, Songs and Doggerels (Heinemann). 1912.
The Inn of Tranquillity: Studies and Essays

(Heinemann). 1912.

The Eldest Son [play] (Duckworth). 1912.
Plays. Volume II. [The Eldest Son; The Little

Dream ; Justice] (Duckworth). 1912.
The Fugitive [play] (Duckworth). 1913.
The Dark Flower (Heinemann). 1913.
The Mob [play] (Duckworth). 1914.
Plays. Volume III. [The Fugitive; The Pigeon;

The Mob] (Duckworth). 1914.
Some Slings and Arrows from John Galsworthy.

Selected by Elsie E. Morton (Elkin Mathews).

1914.

116

BIBLIOGEAPHY

Memories [an illustrated reprint of a single study
from " The Inn of Tranquillity "] (Heinemann).
1914.

The Little Man, and other Satires (Heinemann).
1915.

A Bit o' Love [play] (Duckworth). 1915.

The Freelands (Heinemann). 1915.

117

AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Island Pharisees (Putnam}. 1904. New edition,

1908.

The Man of Property (Putnam). 1906.
The Country House (Putnam). 1907. New edition

(Scribner). 1914.
Villa Rubein (Putnam). 1908.
A Commentary (Putnam). 1908.
Fraternity (Putnam). 1909.
Plays : First Series (Putnam). 1909.
Joy [play] (Scribner). 1910.
A Motley (Scribner). 1910.
Justice [play] (Scribner). 1910.
The Patrician (Scribner). 1911.
The Little Dream [play] (Scribner). 1911.
The Pigeon [play] (Scribner). 1912.
Moods, Songs and Doggerels (Scribner). 1912.
The Eldest Son [play] (Scribner). 1912.
The Inn of Tranquillity (Scribner). 1912.
Plays : Second Series (Scribner). 191,3.
The Fugitive [play] (Scribner). 1913.
The Dark Flower (Scribner). 1913.
The Mob [play] (Scribner). 1914.
118

BIBLIOGKAPHY

Plays : Third Series (Scribner). 1914.

Memories [an illustrated reprint of a single study

from "The Inn of Tranquillity"] (Scribner").

1914.

The Little Man, and other Satires (Scribner). 1915*
A Bit o' Love [play] (Scribner). 1915.
The Freelands (Scribner). 1915.

119

INDEX

About Censorship, 93
Abracadabra, 96

Barclay, Florence, 10
Barker, Granville, 18
Bennett, Arnold, 10, 12
Bit o' Love, A, 16, 37, 44-47

Caine, Hall, 10

Caste, 34

Commentary, A, 88-90, 97

Conrad, Joseph, 10, 12, 15

Corelli, Marie, 10

Country House, The, 56, 63-68, 82, 83

Dark Flower, The, 15, 54, 56, 78-81, 84, 109
Davies, H. H., 18
Dostoevsky, 110

Eldest Son, The, 26, 27, 33-34, 37, 49

Fisher of Men, A, 90

Flaubert, 111

Fraternity, 55, 56, 69-74, 83, 85, 89, 102, 108

Freelands, The, 56, 81-85

Fugitive, The, 26, 35-37, 102

Grand Jury, The, 93

Hall Marked, 96
Houghton, Stanley, 18
Housewife, The, 96

121

JOHN GALSWORTHY

Inn of Tranquillity, The, 88, 91-94, 95
Island Pharisees, The, 56, 57, 58, 102

Jones, H. A., 18
Joy, 26, 37-41, 49, 81
Justice, 23-26, 37-48, 102
Justice (in A Commentary), 88

Kipling, 12

Little Dream, The, 15, 47, 50, 51, 98
Little Man, The, 88, 94-97

Man of Devon, A, 16, 86

Man of Property, The, 56, 58-63, 69, 82, 83, 84, 87, 102, 106

Masefield, John, 18

Maugham, Somerset, 18

Memories, 93

Mob, The, 37, 41-43 ^

Moods, Songs and Doggerels, 16, 98, 99

Mother, A, 89, 91

Motley, A, 88, 90-91, 94, 97

Novelist's Allegory, A, 92
Once More, 91

Patrician, The, 16, 55, 56, 74-77, 83, 103
Pigeon, The, 47-50
Plain Man, The, 96

Riding in Mist, 16, 93

Salvation of a Forsyte, The, 87
'" "Silver Box, The, 26-33, 34, 35, 37, 94, 102
Shaw, Bernard, 18, 19, 102
Some Platitudes Concerning the Drama, 93, 101
122

INDEX

Street Lamps, 98, 99

Strife, 21, 22, 24, 26, 35, 37, 42, 48, 94

Studies in Extravagance, 95

Old-Time Place, 93
Tolstoy, 110
Turguenev, 111

Ultima Thule, 97

Villa Rubein and Other Stories, 15, 86

Wells, H. G., 10, 12
Wind in the Rocks, 91, 92
W riter, The, 95

123

PR Kaye-Snith, Sheila

6013 John Qalsworthy

A5Z6
1916

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