It is sometimes said that an artist never intrudes his personality into his work and that the great writers of the world have kept themselves so closely to themselves that their readers have never been able to discover anything of their faith or partialities. This is not only untrue, but is also absurd, for how can any man hope to exclude himself from his creations, since without him the creations would not be? There never was a book of any sort which did not in some fashion reveal the nature of its author to discerning readers, and I will personally undertake to give a fairly accurate account of the general character of any author after an attentive reading of all his writings. There are authors, such as Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, who do not make any pretence of excluding themselves from the notice of their readers: they deliberately force themselves into their books; and the habit has become so much a part of their nature that they sometimes do it unconsciously. One may say of them, perhaps, that we learn chiefly from their writings what their opinions are, but learn nothing of their characters. But while it is true that we do receive much information about their opinions, it is true also, I think, that they unmistakably reveal themselves, something of the intimate parts of them, to those who closely consider their books. Fielding formally held up the course of his stories in order that he might state his views to his readers, and Dickens and Thackeray followed his example; but all three of them revealed more than their beliefs to their readers—they revealed themselves. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are excellent examples of what may be described as the Direct Revealers—writers who nakedly manifest their opinions and, more or less nakedly, their personalities in their books. The Indirect Revealers are best exemplified in two poets, Shakespeare and John Millington Synge, and one novelist and dramatist, Mr. John Galsworthy. We have very little documentary evidence of Shakespeare's existence, and it is impossible, therefore, to write his biography with the accuracy of detail with which one is able to record the events of, say, Roosevelt's career; but there is a clear and unmistakable account of his hopes and fears and beliefs and disbeliefs, a most faithful portrait of his character, contained in his poems and plays. How can any one fail to discover behind his work the figure of a grave, fastidious, disdainful and distrustful and solitary man whose spiritual solitude was concealed under an appearance of gregariousness and cheerful living that made him a good companion on most occasions without being excessively popular. Ben Jonson, despite his quarrelsome character, was probably more deeply loved by his contemporaries than Shakespeare was, because Shakespeare had more of reserve and spiritual isolation than Ben had, and was less willing to put faith in the virtue of the crowd; and I imagine that had one interrogated any of Shakespeare's friends, they would have said of him, "Oh, yes, I like William Shakespeare very much! Talks well! He's a good chap, but a little odd ... queer ... at times. It isn't easy to make friends with him. He always keeps us at our distance—not deliberately, of course, but in some vague way. He understands us all right, and he takes part in our revels, but he never completely descends to our level. Now, old Ben ... he's a good, hearty chap! He is so comradely that we frequently forget he is Ben Jonson and think of him as just one of ourselves. Shakespeare's friendly enough, but we never forget that he is Shakespeare. Sometimes, quite unintentionally, he makes us feel a little common!..."
The best biography of John Synge that I have read—and l have read all of them—is contained in his plays and poems. It is impossible to rise from his books without an impression of intense loneliness and unachievable desires, of a man eager to be the hero of romantic exploits, but totally unable to stand up to life and make himself a hero because of some spiritual ineffectiveness, some lack of assertion which results in fumbling and self-distrust; and one goes from the plays and poems to the biographies and is not surprised at reading of his lonely life. How often the word "lonesome" occurs in his writings, and how deeply he insists on the terrors of solitude! Pegeen Mike in the "The Playboy of the Western World" reproves her father for going "over the sands to Kate Cassidy's wake" and leaving her alone in the shebeen:
If I am a queer daughter, it's a queer father'd be leaving me lonesome these twelve hours of dark, and I piling the turf with the dogs barking, and the calves mooing, and my own teeth rattling with the fear.
I imagine that there is some deep personal feeling of Synge's in the speech he puts into the mouth of Christy Mahon in the second act of the same play:
Christy: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again, and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be looking for the Lord?
Pegeen: What call have you to be lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?
Christy: It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.
Pegeen: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes on to this hour to-day.
Christy: What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in the world?
The scene of all his plays is laid in a lonely place: the last cottage at the head of a long glen in Wicklow; a small and remote island off the west coast of Ireland; a distant hamlet in a mountainous district. His people are possessed of a perpetual fear of death and old age, and lead uneventful lives, having minds which continually crave for the performance of splendid and unusual deeds. Few men have put their longings and disappointments so boldly and plainly into their work as John Synge put his. I do not suggest that an author may be identified with every word and action of his creatures—a manifestly absurd suggestion—but I do suggest that it is possible for an intelligent reader to obtain a very clear and well-defined impression of the character and beliefs of an author from a careful study of the whole body of his work.
II
Mr. John Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern men of letters, but his sensitiveness is of a peculiar nature, for it is almost totally impersonal. One thinks of Dostoievsky eternally pitying himself in the belief that he was pitying humanity and particularly that part of it which is Russian; or of Maxim Gorki, as shown in his vivid and extraordinary study of Leo Tolstoi,[4] preoccupied with himself to the extent of imagining that Tolstoi, the aristocrat, related salacious stories in common speech to him, the peasant, because he imagined that Gorki, being of vulgar origin, could not appreciate refined conversation:
I remember my first meeting with him and his talk about "Varienka Oliessova" and "Twenty-six and One." From the ordinary point of view, what he said was a string of indecent words. I was perplexed by it and even offended. I thought that he considered me incapable of understanding any other kind of language. I understand now: it was silly to have felt offended.
One thinks, too, of Mr. Shaw's lively interest in himself, and of Mr. Wells's eagerness to remold the world nearer to his heart's desire. And remembering these men, intensely individual and not reluctant to speak of themselves, one is startled to discover how destitute of egotism Mr. Galsworthy seems to be. It may even be argued that his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry, that it is impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is. He has written more than a dozen novels and at least a dozen plays, but there is not one line in any of them to denote that he takes any interest whatever in John Galsworthy. The most obvious characteristic of his work is an immense and, sometimes, indiscriminating pity, but I imagine that the only creature on whom he has no pity is himself. Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence which was characteristic of the English people—I am now using the word "English" in the strict sense—in pre-war times, but is hardly characteristic of them now, is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy. And yet there are few among contemporary writers who reveal so much of themselves as he does. Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells, who constantly expose their beliefs to their readers, do in the long run tell so much about their characters as Mr. Galsworthy, who never makes a conscious revelation of himself and is probably quite unaware that he had made any revelations at all. How often have we observed in our own relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy's handsome, sensitive face and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.
I remember, more than ten years ago, reading a notice of the first performance of "Justice" in an English Sunday newspaper in which the critic, who must have been terribly drunk when he wrote it, attacked the play, making nine misstatements of fact about it in as many lines. Those were the days when I took the field on the slightest provocation. An insult offered to a man of letters for whom I had respect was an insult offered to me, and I made much trouble for myself by smacking faces with great ferocity for offences, not against me, but against my friends and my betters. I wrote a letter to that critic which created some havoc in his sodden brain, and I then posted a copy of it to Mr. Galsworthy. He thanked me very civilly for what I had done, and added that he never replied to criticism of any sort! I was astounded by his statement and a little dashed. My faith in those days was, crudely, two eyes for one tooth! Those who struck at me might expect two blows in return. Like Mrs. Ferguson, in my play, "John Ferguson," I said to myself, "If anyone was to hurt me, I'd do my best to hurt them back and hurt them harder nor they hurt me!" I could not bring myself into line with the meekness of Mr. Galsworthy until I discovered in it a form of supreme arrogance!... Now that I know him and his work better, I realize that I was wrong in my estimation of him both as excessively meek and excessively arrogant. His rule never to reply to criticism, however unfair, is a sign, not of humility or pride, but of complete indifference to himself. I can believe in him becoming furious with one who belittles a dog, but I cannot believe in him displaying any feeling over one who belittles John Galsworthy.
But when I look at his tightened lips, I feel certain that they are drawn closely together, not to prevent himself from forgetting his indifference to himself, but to prevent him from pouring out his anger at wrong and cruelty suffered by other people. His hatred of injustice possesses him like a fury, so that I expect to find his hands always clenched. There are times, indeed, when he allows his feeling for others, human and animal, to destroy his sense of proportion, and he will sometimes imagine that people or beasts are suffering a great deal more of pain than they really are, even that they are suffering when in fact they are not suffering at all. This is the complaint most commonly made of him by his critics, that he sometimes exaggerates the extent to which people and, particularly, animals suffer. When I was a child, I remember that I often read in sentimental Sunday-school books of slum children who never smiled and had never seen grass. I suppose that fundamentally I have a sceptical mind, for even then I found myself doubting whether there were any children in the world who had never seen grass. Grass is so persistent!... I knew that a street had only to be free of traffic for a short while and little blades of grass would begin to push up from between the cobbles!... It might be that slum children never smiled—though I was dubious of that—but all of them must have seen some grass sometime. Then I grew up and left Ulster and went to England, and for two or three years I lived on the confines of a slum in South London, where I discovered that my sentimental authors were sentimental liars, that poor people do not live lives of incessant misery, that they smile and laugh as often as, if not more frequently than, rich people, and are fully as happy as any one else. Happiness and unhappiness are conditions of the spirit, and provided a man has sufficient food to eat and a decent shelter and warm clothes, it matters very little whether he be rich or poor. Mr. Galsworthy is not always as sensible of this as he might be. Like many idealists he attaches more importance to material things than many materialists do. He lets himself be too easily persuaded that a thing is wrong because it looks wrong. If he had walked into the Valley of Elah on that morning when the fair and ruddy youth, David, encountered Goliath, he would certainly have run to David's side. What combat could have seemed more unequal than that? David was young and slender and of ordinary stature. He wore no armor and his weapons were a sling and five pebbles casually picked from a brook. Goliath was five cubits and a span high, and his huge body was covered with heavy armor. There was a helmet of brass on his head, and there were greaves of brass on his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. His weapons were terrible: the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam, and his spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron. A man walked in front of him carrying a shield!... No wonder that Goliath mocked at David and threatened to pick the flesh from his bones and give it to the birds. He probably felt that one breath from his mouth would blow David clean out of the valley. Mr. Galsworthy, had he been present on that occasion, would have said to himself, "Poor David, young and slight and ill-armed, has no chance whatever against this great hulking, uncircumcized Philistine!..." The combat certainly was an unequal one, but the advantage lay, not with Goliath, but with David. The giant had the outward show of strength, but David had the Power of God in his right arm, and before that Power Goliath was but a boneless beast. Mr. Galsworthy makes Stephen More in his play "The Mob," revile the crowd in these terms:
You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women; howls down free speech. This to-day, and that to-morrow. Brain—you have none! Spirit—not the ghost of it! If you're not meanness, there's no such thing. If you're not cowardice, there is no cowardice.
Neither Stephen More nor Mr. Galsworthy appears to know that these characteristics of the mob are the characteristics of weak things. Strong men do not pelt the weak or kick women, nor do they prevent free speech. It is weak men and timid men and ignorant, frightened men—politicians and officials and guttersnipes and sinners—who do these things, because they have neither the courage nor the strength nor the intelligence to do otherwise. The mob-instinct of unreasoning chivalry, the natural impulse to take the part of "the little 'un," constitutes a very serious danger to Mr. Galsworthy's work: he is becoming increasingly partisan in his opinions and sympathies, with the result that his sentiment is in danger of degenerating into sentimentalism, and he, so commonly considered impartial, is likely to end in a state of hopeless and wrong-headed bias. He is beginning to believe that a weak man is right because he is weak. He is forgetting the truth enunciated, perhaps excessively, by Dr. Stockmann in "An Enemy of the People" that "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands absolutely alone." Or if he has not forgotten it, he is in danger of believing that a minority is always in the right because it is a minority: a belief which is as fallacious as that which Mr. G. K. Chesterton sometimes seems to hold, that a majority is always in the right because it is a majority. The plain and platitudinous truth is that only those are in the right who are in the right, whether they be in a majority or in a minority. Weakness, although it may endow a man with cunning, does not endow him with moral authority. Mr. Galsworthy at times lets his pity for weakness lead him into seeming to regard it as a sign of infallible judgment.
III
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.
The story of "The Fugitive" is summarily this:—
Clare Huntington, the daughter of a poor parson, is married to George Dedmond, a man of wealth and social position. When the play begins these two have reached that point in their marital relationship when their unhappiness is plain to their acquaintances. The husband, irritated and puzzled, is eager to make a compromise which will not involve legal separation and "talk."
Clare (softly). I don't give satisfaction. Please give me notice.
George. Pish!
Clare. Five years, and four of them like this! I'm sure we've served our time. Don't you really think we might get on better together—if I went away.
George. I've told you I won't stand a separation for no real reason, and have your name bandied about all over London. I have some primitive sense of honour.
While travelling abroad the Dedmonds make the acquaintance of a journalist named Kenneth Malise who is employed on a weekly review. He and Clare become very friendly with each other, but George, who declares that Malise is a bounder, does not share the friendship. Malise knows that Clare is unhappy in her marriage and he incites her to "spread your wings." He does not appear to have thought of what is to become of her when she spreads her wings, nor does he manifest any concern about her ability to remain in flight. His attitude towards her may roughly be said to be: "It doesn't matter what happens to you so long as you run away from your husband!" Clare eventually leaves her husband, and in the second act she goes to Malise's rooms to ask for his advice. She has taken his advice to spread her wings. What is she to do?
Mr. Malise very clearly does not know what she is to do. While he and she are debating about her future his rooms are invaded by Dedmond's parents, his solicitor, and, subsequently, by Dedmond himself. They endeavour to persuade Clare to return to her husband, which she refuses to do, and there is a scene in which George Dedmond, having offered to take Clare back to his home, goes away threatening to divorce her and cite Malise as co-respondent. After this scene Clare, in obedience to her queer sense of honour, which impels her to make hateful returns for favours received, offers herself in physical submission to Malise, without, however, being able to conceal the fact that such submission is loathsome to her. It is necessary, in studying this play, to take considerable notice of Clare's attitude towards physical relationships. Sexual submission is repulsive to her, not only in relation to her husband, whom she dislikes, but also in relation to Malise, for whom she has so much liking that eventually she falls in love with him. At the moment at which the offer is first made, however, she is not in love with Malise: she offers herself to him because she feels that, having brought trouble upon him, she ought to make reparation for her conduct!
Clare. If I must bring you harm—let me pay you back. I can't bear it otherwise! Make some use of me, if you don't mind!
Malise. My God!
She puts her face up to be kissed, shutting her eyes.
Malise. You poor——
He clasps and kisses her; then, drawing back, looks in her face. She has not moved; her eyes are still closed. But she is shivering; her lips are tightly pressed together, her hands twitching.
Malise (very quietly). No, no! This is not the house of a "gentleman."
Clare (letting her head fall, and almost in a whisper). I'm sorry—
Malise. I understand.
Clare. I don't feel. And without—I can't, can't.
Malise (bitterly). Quite right. You've had enough of that.
That speech—"I don't feel. And without—I can't, can't"—is the key-speech of Clare Dedmond's nature, and, in view of the end of the play, must be remembered.
Malise, recognizing that Clare cannot happily be his mistress otherwise than in name, will not accept her offer of physical submission merely as a return for what he may have to bear in her behalf, and so she leaves his flat. She obtains employment as a shop-assistant, and is not seen again, by her family or by Malise, for three months. Then, after she has encountered a relative, she bolts in a panic from the shop and returns to Malise's flat. She proposes to do typewriting and asks him to find employment for her. He gives her some of his own MSS. to type, and while they are discussing her prospects of employment she reveals the fact that she now loves him.
Malise. Can you typewrite where you are?
Clare. I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm changing—to be safe. (She takes a luggage ticket from her glove). I took my things to Charing Cross—only a bag and one trunk. (Then, with that queer expression on her face which prefaces her desperations.) You don't want me now, I suppose?
Malise. What?
Clare (hardly above a whisper). Because—if you still wanted me—I do—now.
Malise (staring hard into her face that is quivering and smiling). You mean it? You do? You care?
Clare. I've thought of you—so much. But only—if you're sure.
He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes.
That love declaration is singularly unconvincing, more so to the reader of the play than to the witness of it. It is not unlikely that Clare's liking for Malise increased during the three months of their separation, particularly as she regarded him as a benefactor to whom she had brought trouble, but it seems to me to be improbable that she would declare her love so casually. Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions make the puzzle more involved. If Clare were in love with Malise to the extent of overcoming her hatred of physical contacts, she would hardly have "that queer expression on her face which prefaces her desperations." When a man or woman is desperate he or she is hopeless or almost hopeless, and if Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions are to be taken seriously then they mean that Clare was willing to become the mistress of Malise for much the same reason that a rat will fight in a corner. But if her words mean what they would seem to mean, surely, given her character and remembering what she has endured, her surrender to Malise will not be accompanied by any signs of desperation at all, but in sheer reaction, if nothing else, by every sign of jubilation and relief.
The attitude of Malise towards Clare does not appear to have undergone any change at all; he is not any more in love with her in the third act than he was in the first act, when, indeed, his love had a dubious aspect. There is no warmth in the man, no glow. He is cold, not with the hard, sharp, tingling cold of ice, but with the flabby chill of a dead fish. When George Dedmond institutes divorce proceedings, citing Malise as co-respondent, the fellow goes to pieces, and whines and bleats to his charwoman because the proprietors of the review on which he is employed propose to dismiss him. They have some scruples against writers who become involved in scandals. The charwoman informs Clare of Malise's misery, and she, knowing that her husband will abandon the suit if she leaves Malise, goes quietly from his flat. Her next appearance is in a restaurant, largely patronized by prostitutes. One does not know what has happened to her in the meantime, but it is plain that she must have suffered acutely, for this delicately bred woman, sensitive to the point of morbidity about sexual relationships, has decided to become a prostitute! We see her entering "The Gascony" for the first time when the fourth act begins. A young man, ordinary, decent, and uncommonly lustful, makes overtures to her, treating her with kindliness when he discovers that he is her first customer. His kindliness helps to reconcile her to her position, and she prepares to leave the restaurant with him. While he is paying the bill two coarse men leer at her, and one of them accosts her, making an appointment for the following evening. As she watches his coarse face, inflamed with lust, she realises the horror of the life she is about to lead, and suddenly makes a decision—she takes a bottle of poison from her dress, pours its contents into a wine-glass, and drinks it. She dies while some sportsmen in an adjoining room play "the last notes of an old song 'This Day a Stag Must Die' on a horn." And that is the end of the play.
It seems to me to be incredible that Clare Dedmond should have gone to that restaurant to sell herself to any casual purchaser. It seems to me, given her nature, incredible that she should even have thought of such a way of life or that, having thought of it, she should not instantly poison herself rather than endure it. Mr. Galsworthy insists throughout the play on her exceptional sensitiveness about sex-relationships. I think that psychologically he has over-stated this sensitiveness, but, assuming that he has not done so, is it conceivable that a woman who shivers and twitches her hands when she is kissed by a man whom she likes will consent to put on fine clothes and go to a notorious restaurant and sit at a table while men inspect her?... (I leave out of consideration such questions as: "Where did she obtain the fine clothes?" "How did she acquire her knowledge of 'The Gascony'?") If she were prepared to endure that last of all defilements, why did she run away from her husband? If she were capable of selling her embraces, why did she shiver and twitch when Malise kissed her? George Dedmond was not a "bad" man. He did not ill-treat her nor was he faithless to her. He insisted, indeed, on sexual submissions, but one has difficulty in believing that her horror of these, "unless I feel," was very strong since she was willing to suffer the casual amours of "The Gascony." There would have been something pitiable in her if, after leaving Malise, she had returned to George. There would have been something tragical in her if, reluctant to return to George, she had killed herself when she found that she could not maintain herself in decency. But there is nothing either pitiable or tragical in the end devised for her by Mr. Galsworthy. It is an arranged and schemed destiny that overwhelms Clare Dedmond, arranged and schemed not by Circumstance but by Mr. Galsworthy, and having no relation whatever to the nature of the woman. Mr. Galsworthy wanted to poison her in "The Gascony," and so he thrust her into the restaurant in plain disregard of her character and of common facts.
There is a phrase in the play which is intended to illuminate Clare's nature. "You're too fine," Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're not fine enough to endure things." How can one be too fine to endure a thing and yet not fine enough to endure it? And, having begun to question in that fashion, one goes on again to wonder why she married her husband. "Five years" (of marriage), she says to her husband, "and four of them like this!" Here is no case of slow transformation of love into dislike or of instant disillusionment. Clare does not suddenly discover or slowly discover that George is not the sort of man she had imagined him to be, for he remains throughout the play exactly the sort of man he was when she was wooed and married by him. He did not become prosaic, unimaginative, and coarse after marriage: he was always like that; and Clare, so sensitive as she was, must have been jarred by him as much before marriage as she was a year after marriage. There is no suggestion in the play that she married for money. Had she done so, surely she would, when we remember the depths to which she was subsequently prepared to descend, have borne his dullness and coarseness, not gladly, perhaps, but with fortitude?
The processes of attraction and repulsion are so complicated that it is difficult to say where one begins and the other ends, but this difficulty is hardly to be experienced in cases where the personalities are so marked and divergent as were the personalities of Clare and George Dedmond. If one were to take a man like Squire Western in "Tom Jones" and marry him to MÉlisande in "PellÉas et MÉlisande," one could prophesy with some certainty what would be the result of such a marriage. It would be disastrous. Left to the ordinary processes of nature, however, such a marriage would not take place at all.
But the difficulty of fathoming Clare's relationships does not end with her husband. It is equally difficult to understand her attitude towards Malise. What attracted her to this extraordinarily ill-bred man who sneers openly at her relatives and friends, mocking and insulting them to her and to their faces? The Dedmonds, parents and son, are dense, but they are decent. They live by rule because they cannot live by any other means. It is not their fault that they cannot understand Clare's point of view, any more than it is the fault of a blind man that he falls over an obstacle which he cannot see. Malise regards them as malignant people, deliberately imprisoning an aspiring woman. His vision of them is as narrow as is theirs of him, and, since he has not got their breeding or kindliness, his conduct is caddish where theirs is merely stupid. There is no magnitude or charity in this man. He spends his days and nights in writing petulant screeds in the style of Thomas Carlyle: windy stuff, blowing out of a noisome mind; and when he has induced one helpless, incompetent woman to follow his creed he fails her completely.
The last sentences of the play show that Mr. Galsworthy had set his mind on Clare's death in disregard of the probabilities. Clare, having swallowed the poison, is lying back in her chair, presumably dead.
The Young Man has covered his eyes with his hands; Arnaud is crossing himself fervently; the Languid Lord stands gazing with one of the dropped gardenias twisted in his fingers; and the woman bending over Clare, kisses her forehead.
That is a piece of theatricality. It has no relationship to real things. Those people, in life, would not have stood about in sentimental attitudes watching a woman die of poison. The young man would have flown for a doctor; the waiter would have rushed off for an emetic; the languid lord would have lost his languid airs in his desire to get away from the restaurant in fear lest he might be summoned as a witness at the inquest; and the woman would promptly have had hysterics.
He seems to be most impressed, in viewing the human scene, by the sense of property which he discovers in mankind. In his best work, the novels of the Forsyte Saga, beginning with "The Man of Property" and ending with "To Let" one finds him attributing this sense to human beings to a degree which is, in my belief, entirely excessive. Soames Forsyte, "the man of property," is portrayed to us as a man who regards all things, human and otherwise, as things to be owned. His wife is a piece of property just as a picture or a dog is. When he obtains a divorce from her and marries a young French girl, Annette, he treats the latter as a piece of valuable property useful for the purpose of producing a still more valuable piece of property; and when Annette bears a daughter to him, he is left exclaiming almost passionately that this child is his, not hers and his, but his! All the members of the Forsyte family, described with great particularity, are possessed of this sense of property, but it is more highly developed in Soames than in any of them. Even those members of it, like young Jolyon Forsyte, who break with the family tradition, concentrate on this property point. They only differ from the rest of the family in being anti-, rather than pro-, property. None of them seems to be indifferent to property. The dominating influence in their lives, either for happiness or for misery, is property. Mr. Galsworthy states of them that as they watched the funeral of Queen Victoria, they felt that they were burying more history for their money than had ever been buried before. One of the Forsyte women loves the statement of Christ that "In My Father's house are many mansions" because it comforts her sense of property. Most of the conflict in the Galsworthy novels springs from the reactions of the characters to this sense, and it is laboured to the point of attenuation. The temperamental differences between Soames and Irene Forsyte in "The Man of Property" are obscurely stated, and still more obscurely stated in the dramatized version of their relationship called "The Fugitive," in which Soames and Irene become George and Clare Dedmond, and Bosinney, the architect-lover, becomes Malise, the journalist-lover. It is true that the differences which break a marriage are sometimes the result of fundamental things which cannot be described with the clarity of the items in an auctioneer's catalogue; but the business of an artist is to make obscure things plain and understandable, and the success of his work depends upon the way in which he impresses his readers with the vagueness and obscurity of these things and yet at the same time makes them realize how substantial they are. Soames and Irene Forsyte may not be able to say why they cannot live together, but Mr. Galsworthy must be able to do so and he must empower his readers to do so, too. A novelist gives a sense of inarticulateness in a character, not by making him so inarticulate that the readers cannot hear or understand a word he is saying, but by making his inarticulateness articulate. The danger into which many writers tumble headlong is that they will spend all their energies on getting the details right and will leave the general effect obscure. One sees signs of this in Mr. Galsworthy's work. He is so busy endowing his people with a sense of property that he occasionally omits to endow them with a sense of humanity. If one compares the Forsyte novels, say, "In Chancery," with Mrs. Edith Wharton's latest book, "The Age of Innocence," one discovers that in each case, the theme is concerned with the institution of the family, with the tribal instinct which makes the majority of minds seek identity rather than dissimilarity. But in Mrs. Wharton's book, this tribal instinct is humanly expressed, whereas in Mr. Galsworthy's it is not. I recognize Mrs. Wharton's people as human beings, but I am sceptical about Mr. Galsworthy's people. Old Mrs. Mingott, in "The Age of Innocence," has affinity with old Jolyon Forsyte in "The Man of Property" and "The Indian Summer of a Forsyte." (He is the most human figure in the Saga.) But the rest of the cast in the Forsyte Saga has less relevance to humanity than the rest of the cast in "The Age of Innocence," and the reason is, I think, that Mr. Galsworthy has allowed his theory to get the better of his people, whereas Mrs. Wharton, whatever her theory may be, has kept her eye very steadfastly on human beings. The Countess Olenska in "The Age of Innocence" has verisimilitude which is absent from the figure of Irene Forsyte in "The Man of Property" or Clare Dedmond in "The Fugitive." We can comprehend Ellen Olenska, but Irene Forsyte utterly eludes us.
V
One entertains oneself with noting how differently an experience of life presents itself to Mr. Galsworthy from the way in which it presents itself to Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Galsworthy sends Falder, in his play "Justice," to prison and flattens him out. Mr. Shaw sends Margaret Knox and Bobby Gilbert, in "Fannie's First Play," to prison and amazingly enlarges their lives. What utterly depresses Mr. Galsworthy, stimulates and even exalts Mr. Shaw. If Mr. Galsworthy tortures us to the point at which we wish to rush out of the theatre and raze Wormwood Scrubbs and Pentonville to the ground, Mr. Shaw causes us to feel that each of us might be considerably benefitted by a sojourn there. Mr. Galsworthy sees a gaol as a place where thought is destroyed or embittered: Mr. Shaw sees it as a place where thought is provoked and clarified; and between them, a simple-minded person cannot make up his mind whether to subscribe to the funds of the Howard League for Penal Reform or to advocate penal servitude for every one in the interests of Higher Thought. Adversity, says Mr. Galsworthy, knocks a man down. Adversity, says Mr. Shaw, braces him up. The first statement may fill a man with pity, but the latter is more likely to make a hero of him.
VI
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!...
