Part 1

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WRITERS OF THE DAY

GENERAL EDITOR: BERTRAM CHRISTIAN

JOHN GALSWORTHY

_By SHEILA KAYE-SMITH_

_NOVELS_

_THE TRAMPING METHODIST_ _STARBRACE_ _SPELL LAND_ _ISLE OF THORNS_ _THREE AGAINST THE WORLD_ _SUSSEX GORSE_

_BELLES LETTRES_

_SAMUEL RICHARDSON_

---

_WILLOWS FORGE AND OTHER POEMS_

JOHN GALSWORTHY

By

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

_First Published in 1916_

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 9

THE PLAYS. I. 17

THE PLAYS. II. 35

THE NOVELS. I. 52

THE NOVELS. II. 69

THE SKETCHES 86

GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST 100

BIBLIOGRAPHY 115

AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 118

INDEX 121

INTRODUCTION

A characteristic 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 enterprises 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, 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 something 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 popularity 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 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 fundamentally 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 are nice as to food swear by a particular restaurant. There is a Wells public, differing 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 describe a writer who is widely read. Galsworthy 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 supplying 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—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 propaganda, 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 cut 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 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 enterprise. 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, indispensable 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.

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 Galsworthy’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 voyagings 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 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 general rather than particular, the spirit rather than the ghost—one feels that Devon is the background of his dreams.

THE PLAYS I

Galsworthy takes his place 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 great playwright. 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 advantage 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 advantage of acting well—unlike much literary 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 apart 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 removed 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.

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 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 characters 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 achievement as a playwright, is _Strife_. Here we have the central situation, the contrasting 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 gradually 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, 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 compromise.” There is a powerful scene between 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 Chairman 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.

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 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 institutions that they ignore—are to a certain extent forced to ignore—the special case, which is almost always better worth considering 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 scenes, and some particularly arresting characters. Cokeson, the little kind-hearted, humble-minded clerk, is a lovable person, and the relations between Falder and Ruth 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 downstairs rather than go back to gaol:

[RUTH _drops on her knees by the body_.]

RUTH [_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.

[RUTH _faces round at him_.]

COKESON. No one’ll 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 Galsworthy’s masterpiece. There is a strong resemblance between its central idea and that of _The Eldest Son_, a far inferior play. 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 important Barthwicks, and the poor, good-for-nothing Joneses, are perfectly balanced. There is no crude over-emphasis of the situation, 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 Barthwick and Jem Jones, and the difference of their treatment: “Dad! that’s what you said to me!” says young Barthwick, 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 particularly 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 because 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 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 it. With this ’ere money I’m going to Canada. I’ll 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 Rosie 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’ll 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. The kids’ll 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 pocket, 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!