I like "The Country House" and "Five Tales" and "To Let" better than
anything else that Mr. Galsworthy has written. The human sense is more
truly felt in these books than in any others that he has done. There
are few figures in modern fiction so tender and beautiful as Mrs.
Pendyce in "The Country House" and few figures so immensely impressive
and indomitable as the old man in the story called "The Stoic" which
is the first of the "Five Tales." The craftsmanship of "To Let" is
superb--this novel is, perhaps, the most technically-correct book of
our time--but its human value is even greater than its craftsmanship.
In a very vivid fashion, Mr. Galsworthy shows the passing of a
tradition and an age. He leaves Soames Forsyte in lonely age, but he
does not leave him entirely without sympathy; for this muddleheaded
man, unable to win or to keep affection on any but commercial terms,
contrives in the end to win the pity and almost the love of the reader
who has followed his varying fortunes through their stupid career.
The frustrate love of Fleur and Jon is certainly one of the tenderest
things in modern fiction. Mr. Galsworthy has a love of beauty which
permeates everything that he writes and reconciles his more critical
readers to his dubious characterization. I suppose the truth about his
work is that he has not sufficiently disciplined his feelings and,
for this reason, allows his sympathies with his suffering people to
swamp his judgments. He is, in every act and thought, a chivalrous
man, and his instinct is, not to examine the facts of a case, but to
rush instantly and hotly to the defence of the seemingly defenceless.
An artist is never indifferent to the wrongs of men, but his artistry
prevents him from making mistakes about the persons who are suffering
the wrongs. One's fear is that Mr. Galsworthy is inclined to allow his
philanthropy to take the place of his artistry. Even in that fine book,
"The Country House," he sometimes makes a formula or a trick out of
some fine, instinctive sentiment. In the fourth chapter of part II, Mr.
Pendyce, during a period of stress, treads on a spaniel's foot.
The spaniel yelped. "D----n the dog! Oh, poor fellow, John!" said
Mr. Pendyce.
Now, in those words, one has exemplified the acute penetration into
people's minds and emotions which is discoverable in Mr. Galsworthy;
but he is not content to leave the incident in its simplicity and
nature. Before we have reached the end of the chapter, that instinctive
utterance by Mr. Pendyce has become a rather threadbare literary trick
by Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Pendyce treads on the dog again two pages
later, and Mr. Pendyce repeats himself exactly: "D----n the dog! Oh,
poor fellow, John!" And five pages later, he treads on the spaniel
a third time, and a third time he says, "D----n the dog! Oh, poor
fellow, John!" It is obvious, surely, that on the first occasion, Mr.
Galsworthy made Mr. Pendyce speak from his heart, but on the second
and third occasions he made him speak like a ventriloquist's doll.
One can find many similarly inapt things even in this book, where Mr.
Galsworthy keeps very close to humanity. Mr. Pendyce ejaculates, on
hearing that his son has gone after illicit love, "What on earth made
me send George to Eton?" when he himself had been educated at another
school. One knows what Mr. Galsworthy is here trying to do, to express
the love of tradition and custom which governs the life of such a man
as Mr. Pendyce, but he does not achieve the effect by such speeches.
The reader feels certain that whatever else Mr. Pendyce may have said
on that occasion, he did not say, "What on earth made me send George
to Eton?" Too many of his people make impotent gestures, and it is
remarkable that these important people are nearly always his most
idealistic characters. Such an one is Gregory Vigil in "The Country
House" who constantly clutches his forehead and tilts his face towards
the sky and generally strikes attitudes of despair until one begins to
feel that he is the weakest of weaklings. And it is extraordinary to
observe what havoc Mr. Galsworthy, ordinarily a very fastidious writer,
sometimes makes of the English language. In "The Man of Property" he
gives a detailed description of Mrs. Septimus Small in the course of
which he states that "an innumerable pout clung all over" her face,
and on the page immediately succeeding the one on which that queer
description occurs, he states that Mrs. Small "owned three canaries,
the cat Tommy, and half a parrot--in common with her sister Hester...."
We may, perhaps, pass "an innumerable pout" as an impressionistic
phrase, but it is quite clear that carelessness caused Mr. Galsworthy
to say that Mrs. Septimus Small owned "half a parrot--in common with
her sister Hester" when what he wished to say was that Hester and she
were joint owners of a parrot! He sometimes uses images which are
almost ludicrous. In "Saints Progress," we get this curious account of
an old woman in tears:
A little pasty woman with a pinched yellowish face was already
sitting there, so still, and seeming to see so little, that Noel
wondered of what she could be thinking. While she watched, the
woman's face began puckering, and tears rolled slowly down,
_trickling from pucker to pucker_....
The italics are mine.
It is his sincerity and his chivalry and his pity and his sense of
beauty, a little too conscious, perhaps, which, much more than his
powers of thought, make us read his novels and witness the performance
of his plays. These qualities tend to become obsessions in him with the
result that his sense of proportion and his verity are disorganized and
he is led into sentimentalities, some of which, on first sight, have an
impressive appearance which is not maintained after closer scrutiny.
In one of his plays, "A Bit o' Love," he makes the chief character, a
young clergyman, end the play with this prayer:
God, of the moon and the sun; of joy and beauty, of loneliness and
sorrow--Give me strength to go on, till I love every living thing.
That is a prayer which sounds impressive until it is critically
considered. It is not possible for a man to love every living thing.
There are certain things which he hates with his mind and certain
things which he hates with his instincts, and it is either very
difficult or impossible for him to control those hatreds. The best
he can hope for is the power to restrain his hatred from active
demonstrations. There are hatreds which he ought to possess, hatreds
which Mr. Galsworthy himself possesses in a high degree; hatred
of cruel men, hatred of oppressive men, hatred of men who promote
discord out of sheer devilish delight; but these hatreds are feeble
in comparison with the instinctive hatreds most of us have without
understanding why we have them. To pray for strength to go on until
one loves every living thing is, therefore, to pray for the moon,
and exalted desires which are insusceptible of realization become
banalities. There are times, in his anger at coarseness and cruel
insult and lack of pity, when Mr. Galsworthy attributes a degree
of ruffianliness to people which is lacking in verity. In "Saint's
Progress," he causes "two big loutish boys" to jeer at the old
clergyman, Pierson, whose daughter has had a war-baby without being
married. The two "loutish boys" shout after him, "Wot price the
little barstard?" Now, I simply do not believe that such a thing
happened or could have happened in London during the war. Cruelty
did not manifest itself in just that way, and it is here, I think,
that one discovers Mr. Galsworthy's chief disability, the fact that
his powers of observation are not so acute as one might reasonably
expect them to be. There is an old saying that the looker-on sees
most of the game--and there is some truth in it; but it is true
also that the looker-on may be totally ignorant of, or misinformed
about, the game, whereas those who are engaged in it have a fairly
comprehensive notion of what they are doing. Mr. Galsworthy gives
me the impression of being a looker-on at the game rather than a
participator in it, and although he is sometimes a very impassioned
spectator, yet he suffers from the disability of all spectators that
they are not clearly instructed in the principles and the prejudices
of the contest. He is praying for strength to love every living thing
when he should be praying for the power to distinguish between what is
lovable and what is detestable, between true things and false things.
There are few people who can depict the helplessness of dull men so
skilfully and movingly as Mr. Galsworthy can. I doubt whether any of
his contemporaries could so revealingly describe the state of mind
of a man, spiritually imperceptive and puzzled by his inability to
understand, as Mr. Galsworthy in his novel "In Chancery" has described
Soames Forsyte after he has obtained a divorce from his first wife.
The dumb animal bewilderment of this man, still in love with Irene but
utterly confounded by her complete revulsion from him, is done with the
most extraordinary penetration; and it is scenes such as this, which
cause his readers all the more to marvel at his obsessions and their
attendant failures.
One rises from a consideration of his work in the belief that he
pities mankind, but does not love it. He is a spectator of our
struggles rather than a comrade in them. He stands at the side of
the road or perhaps on an eminence a little way off and watches the
procession as it goes by. We feel certain that if we are in trouble
he will display signs of sorrow for us, but we are equally certain
that he will never share our common qualities and faults. Rabelais
would have been self-conscious in the presence of Mr. Galsworthy, had
they been contemporaries, and Mr. Galsworthy might have despised,
would certainly have been uncomfortable with that foul physician who,
nevertheless, corresponded more closely to this various clay we call
mankind, would have known and understood more certainly the ups and
downs of human character, the mixture of coarseness and refinement,
of falsity and faith, of chivalry and treachery, of generosity and
meanness, of selfishness and unselfishness, of rare and common, than
Mr. Galsworthy is ever likely to do. Mr. Hardy, in a preface to "Tess
of the D'Urbervilles" declares that "a novel is an impression, not an
argument" and in those eight words has summarized the whole business
of story-telling. Mr. Galsworthy can tell a story very skilfully. His
technique is remarkable, as any one who has read "To Let" or seen
a performance of "Loyalties" can testify; but there are too many
occasions when he seems to have let go his hold on reality and to be
writing out of dim memories which are growing dimmer. His characters
resemble people who are hurriedly seen through a window by one who
is ignorant of their identity and anxious, chiefly, to be at home.
They are making gestures and their lips move, but the hasty footfarer
outside cannot hear what they are saying and he sees only the gestures,
incomplete, perhaps, but does not know why they are made; and because
he knows so little, he is likely to misunderstand all. I imagine that
when Mr. Galsworthy goes into a garden, his delight in it is dashed by
the thought that somewhere near at hand a thrush is killing a snail!...