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:

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:

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: