Mr. Galsworthy can create people and he can write natural dialogue.
"The Silver Box" is a testimony of his power to do so. But in his later
plays he has not always allowed his creatures to behave in a creditable
fashion, nor has he always written dialogue that exactly fits their
tongues. One suspects, too, that he is losing his sense of proportion,
that he is not so capable now as he was earlier in his career of
distinguishing between things which are important and things which are
not. He has developed an interest in trivial questions of sex and has
become so absorbed in dilemmas of colliding characters that he has lost
sight of the nature of his characters. He has been called a Determinist
because he shows his people as the creature of circumstances, but
in his later work, particularly in his play "The Fugitive," his
Determinism has become wilful: he seems to have made up his mind that
his characters shall become the victims of circumstances in defiance of
facts and the natures with which he has created them. He deliberately
ties their hands behind their backs and then exclaims: "These are
the victims of adverse circumstances!" And indeed they are, but the
circumstances have been artificially created by Mr. Galsworthy and not
by any force that governs the universe. He is so eager to bring Clare
Dedmond, in "The Fugitive," to her death in a restaurant frequented by
prostitutes that he totally neglects to consider the fact that with the
nature he gives her she is the last person on earth likely to end that
way.
It is not in ideas that Mr. Galsworthy fails, so far as his later work
is concerned--it is in execution. The idea of "The Fugitive" is a
notable one. The play, which in its faults is significant of all Mr.
Galsworthy's later plays, deals with the tragic failure of a sensitive
woman to adjust her life to that of a dull, unimaginative man in whom,
although the conventions and traditions of his class have schooled
him into a certain decency of form, there is a very large measure of
coarseness. The collision is between the finely-perceptive and the
totally-imperceptive, and the theme is similar, in one respect, to
that of "The Doll's House," and in another to that of "The Shadow of
the Glen." But the treatment of it is very inferior to the treatment
of it by Ibsen and Synge. Ibsen plainly showed how impossible it was
for Nora to continue to live with her husband after she had suffered
her disillusionment. He showed with equal clarity how natural it was
that she should marry and love her husband, and yet in the end, turn
away from him. Mr. Galsworthy takes Clare Dedmond beyond the stage to
which Ibsen took Nora. Ibsen was content to end his play with Nora's
exit from her husband's home: he did not follow her from it nor show
what became of her thereafter. Mr. Galsworthy is concerned less with
the act of separation and more with the consequences of it. He is not
so interested in her flight from her husband as he is in what happens
to her after she has flown from him. He has taken a longer stretch of
Clare's life than Ibsen took of Nora's, but he has contrived to make it
smaller than Nora's. One derives an extraordinary sense of completeness
and space from "The Doll's House," but does not derive a similar sense
from "The Fugitive." Ibsen gives one a sense of familiarity with his
people, but Mr. Galsworthy hardly makes one more familiar with Clare
Dedmond and her husband than a reader of a newspaper is with the
principal parties to a divorce suit.
Clare Dedmond, like Nora Burke in Synge's "The Shadow of the Glen,"
is suffering from starved emotions, but Synge in his one-act play has
created the atmosphere of starved emotions far more successfully than
Mr. Galsworthy has done in his four acts. The antagonism between Nora
and Daniel Burke is instantly understood by the reader, who, however,
cannot immediately understand why it is that Clare and George Dedmond
do not "get on" together. The reader knows why Nora married Daniel.
"And how would I live and I an old woman if I hadn't a bit of a farm
with cows on it and sheep on the blackhills?" The sense of desolation
in this woman's life is so powerfully expressed that the reader of
the play does not ask questions. He does not stop to inquire why Nora
married her husband: he _knows_ why she married him, and this knowledge
is derived, not from the author's assertions, but from the woman's
behaviour. A sense of desolation is not created when the author says
that there is desolation, nor is it created when a character says:
"I am miserable!" It is created when the speech and behaviour of the
characters are such as one hears and sees when people are unhappy. It
would be absurd for a writer to make a character say: "I have a very
kindly disposition," and then show him in the normal habit of beating
his wife, kicking his grandmother, and ill-treating animals ... unless
he were trying to be funny or were portraying a madman. There must
be consistency between character and conduct, and the measure of a
writer's artistry is the degree to which he succeeds in reconciling the
one with the other.
It is when Mr. Galsworthy's later work is tested in this manner that
one realizes how lamentably he has failed to create the illusion of
life. One goes through the pages of "The Fugitive" making notes of
interrogation! One does not ask: "Why did Ibsen's Nora marry her
husband?" "Why did Synge's Nora marry her husband?" because one knows
the answer to these questions from the beginning of the plays, and
it is not necessary to ask them. But why did Clare Dedmond marry her
husband? Because she loved him? Because she wished to be married and no
one else had asked her? For money? To escape from her parents? It is
impossible to say. Most of the faults which I find in Mr. Galsworthy's
work are to be found in this play and so I propose to examine it here
in detail.