streets, the central 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 see it hovering near _Fraternity_. The combinations and
permutations of blood relationship seem to interest him enormously—the
modern push and individualism, half attacking, half combining 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 unloved 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 balance, too deliberate a
sacrifice of the artist to the moralist, 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
inevitably in Galsworthy’s treatment of even the stuffiest theme. We
have, too, a sense of aloofness which, if it is sometimes irritating, 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 understanding. 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 temporarily, one hopes, the last.
THE SKETCHES
_Villa Rubein_ and four short stories under the title of _A Man of
Devon_ were published anonymously. All early efforts, they are not on a
line with Galsworthy’s later work, but they have about them a certain
beauty and individuality which makes them worth considering. 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 sensitive charm the life of a
half-Austrian household, is full of tenderness, but lacking somehow 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 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 corresponding 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 comment 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 off French excellence of craft.
The other stories are too long for 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. Continually, in the plays and in the novels,
Galsworthy reveals the utter brutishness of some of these submerged
ones. He never 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 civilisation 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 together by the central idea, which is the
exposure—ironic, indignant, embittered, infinitely pitying—of the
inequalities between the poor and the rich. True, there is atmosphere,
style, a sense of character; but in _A Commentary_ the artist takes
second place.
_A Motley_ is, as the title implies, a collection 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
observation and intuition, and at the same time a certain lack of 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
knowledge less embittered than in _A Commentary_. Particularly
successful is _A Fisher of Men_, in 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 meetings 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 Galsworthy 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 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 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 Concerning the Drama_ plenty of illumination. Indeed,
in this article we are given a plain enough statement of the rules which
evidently govern Galsworthy’s own work. For instance: “A good plot is
that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the interplay of
circumstance on temperament and temperament 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 pronouncement
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, suppressing 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
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 restlessness. 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 remorseless, 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 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
himself. 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 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
successful. When we remember the exquisite prose of his plays, novels
and sketches, the admirable description, the sense of atmosphere, not
forgetting also the genuine poetry of much of _The Little Dream_, we are
surprised 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’rywhere!
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—
Inscrutable your nightly glance,
Your lighting and your snuffing out,
Your flicker through the windy rout,
Guiding this mazy dance.
O watchful, troubled gaze of gold,
Protecting us upon our beats—
You piteous glamour of the streets,
Youthless, and never old!”
GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST
Galsworthy is an artist before he 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 excellence is grounded in ideas. _Strife_, for instance, 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 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 another,
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 concerning Drama_: “A drama must be shaped so
as to have a spire of meaning. Every grouping of life and character has
its inherent moral; and the business of the dramatist 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 these 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 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 considers the force and passion of so much
of his work, to realise that it is all got from surface-workings—not
that he ever suggests the shallow or superficial, it is simply a
reluctance to dig.
Take, for example, Miltoun, in _The Patrician_; here he has attempted to
draw a character whose actions spring from the inmost recesses of his
being, and the result is a certain unconvincingness marring a fine
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 perpetual 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 the 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
acquaintances than friends.
This surface-working in character is liable to impair situation, since
the two are interdependent. Galsworthy is a master of situation, but
occasionally, when the depths ought to be sounded, we are put off with a
consummate skill of arrangement, a perfection of combination and
interplay. This is so splendidly done that it is generally not till
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 so. The sense of aloofness is due partly to his scrupulous
fairness in examining every point of view, partly to an exaggerated
restraint, and a shrinking from analyses which are not 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 so often accused of coldness, he is masterly in
conveying the charged atmosphere of passion. It is true that he writes
with 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 an opening 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 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 a sob?”
Next to a sense of situation Galsworthy must be granted a sense of
atmosphere. This is due to the extraordinary sensitiveness 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 young
wheat; music, but no full choir of sound, no hum.”
This passage from _Fraternity_ shows Galsworthy’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, twilight 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 stared, wan in that hour of
passing day—all things had eyes wistful and unblessed.”[1]
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Footnote 1:
_The Dark Flower._
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