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:

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.

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:

In the matter of style, Galsworthy is not a purist. One finds a split infinitive spoiling a procession of beautiful words, and one occasionally loses patience over a squad of panting verbless sentences all beginning with “And.” But he has a gift worth more than grammatical perfection, and that is a real sense of words. In their combinations, contrasts, and values, he marshals them with a poet’s strategy. He loves those words which hold their meanings as soldiers their weapons; one sees him apportioning the place of honour in a sentence, ranking the subordinates. He is so absolute a craftsman that we see in his occasional lapses more of a deliberate disregard than ignorance, and certainly nothing of the slipshod.

His dialogue in the plays is masterly—not always so effective in the novels. He is at his best in the dialogue of the lower classes. Sometimes, even in the plays, the conversation of his “gentlefolk” is apt to be stilted or to drag. On the other hand, the speech of the poor is always both spontaneous and significant. He has a wonderful power of economy in words. Throughout the plays, and in the most memorable dialogues in the novels, there is not a word too much, and yet there is nothing jerky or scrappy in the general impression.

Galsworthy is not a writer who owes much to outside influence. The first thought of “influence” in his case calls up ideas of French and Russian literature, but it would be surer to say that the resemblance is due to French and Russian qualities in the author’s outlook and state of mind than to discipleship either unconscious or deliberate.

Certainly he has that infinite pity, almost reverence, for suffering which characterises Russian ideas. But the same pity and reverence are not expressed in the large, straightforward manner of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but with Gallic subtlety and irony, recalling Flaubert. The writer with whom he has greatest affinity, to whom he may be said to be to a certain extent indebted, is Turguenev. In Turguenev we see the meeting ground of French and Russian art. There is the breadth, the tenderness, the mysticism of the Slav, mingling with the Frenchman’s sense of humour and sense of form. Every writer who sets store on form must expect to be credited with French influences. English art is essentially naÏve in technique. Galsworthy has few, if any, English affinities. But, on the other hand, he has anglicised the foreign influences. The Russian pity is shorn of its mysticism, the French irony of its gaiety. These two combinations are characteristic of the countries of their origin, and Galsworthy splits them, choosing the pity and the irony, leaving the mysticism and the gaiety—thus asserting both his personality and his race.

Galsworthy is a pessimist—not in the spirit of fire and revolt, but in the spirit of an artist, sad, rather hopeless, and compassionate. Everywhere he sees ills—the trampling of the weak and poor, the conflict of instinct and civilisation, the pariahdom of the enlightened, the tyranny of unimaginativeness, hypocrisy and greed. He suggests no remedy—in fact, he insists continually on the difficulty of finding any remedy which shall be at once permanent and adequate—he just exposes the sore, and shows at the same time his burning pity for it, kindling our own.

But if he realises with painful vividness the evil and sorrow of life, and if a certain tired hopelessness and dislike of interference keep him from dreaming a brighter future, his eyes are not blind to beauty, to tenderness, and charm. Though his fine characters are almost always in revolt, though his beauty is always softened with pathos, his rare humour twisted with satire, we must acknowledge that he has a true sense of the splendour, the loveliness, and the fun of life. He sees them, so to speak, through a mist of tears, but he does not miss them altogether. It is because he is so much more than a social reformer, because he is an artist and a sensitive, that he cannot glibly set down remedies for the world’s wrongs. The genuine reformer is never content with pointing out the evils of a system, he has an improving plan. Galsworthy only shows us the shadows, with the lights that lie beside them, not those lights which shall scatter them at last. He is an artist, and the artist’s vision is not of the future, but of to-day. [Blank Page]