Contemporary Novelists: John Galsworthy
I
THE social philosopher who has but one large thing to say usually says it over and over again in a voice which becomes at length a shout or a frenzied shriek. Mr. John Galsworthy stands practically alone among latter-day novelists, as the social philosopher who, as often as he delivers his one message, repeats it in a voice of astonishing quietness and clarity. Of all the qualities that make up the rich timbre of that voice, it is surely this trait of quietude, of coolness, that impresses the hearer first and haunts him longest. In a decade when most art has been noisy, and when especially the art of iconoclastic thinkers has treated itself liberally in the matter of rant and gesticulation, the art of Mr. Galsworthy has remained serene. The thing said is so simple, and withal so comprehensive, that the most casual wayfaring reader can hardly miss its purport. But the voice in which it is said is so exquisite in its modulations, so entirely unperturbed among the various shouting, screaming, or wailing voices of our time, that to hear it justly requires some intentness in the listener. And this is the excuse for postponing the message a moment in order to describe the inflection of the utterance.
One can best summarize the style of Mr. Galsworthy by saying that no single quality of it has the dubious distinction of calling attention to itself. It is a style that wins without arresting, and persuades without ever having challenged. It is quite without selfassertiveness, yet it is charged with individuality. Its frequent brilliance of phrase is simply the maximum of fitness and neat condensation, the brilliance that comes from self-discipline and long apprenticeship, and not from the paroxysmal cleverness of particular moments. Without the crackling smartness of Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Bernard Shaw, without the mannerism of the later Henry James, without the flippant facility of Mr. Arnold Bennett, it manages to become a profoundly personal means of expression. There is nothing meretricious in it that one can identify it by — no hysterical violence, no sacrifice of sense to sound or of truth to wit. Where many an artist has lost himself in self-assertion, Mr. Galsworthy has evidently found himself in self-effacement.
For it is quite clear that he has found himself. His calm assurance is essentially that of the sure touch. It is possible for the worker in prose to be carried away from truth and sincerity by giving the public more and always more of what it has first applauded in him, as a speechifying demagogue responds to the popular acclaim by going with every sentence further and further beyond what he means. It is also possible for him, if he finds himself ignored or derided, to lash himself into an infuriated utterance in the attempt to win a hearing at any cost. But Mr. Galsworthy has neither the insincerity of the spectacular success nor that of the desperate failure. We find thriving more and more in his pages, as the number of them grows, what must surely be called the finest flower of artistic experience — artistic self-knowledge and self-command. Academically, Mr. Galsworthy would be a writer of importance if he had nothing of unique impressiveness to communicate, simply because, through this distinguished restraint of his craftsmanship, he has proved more conclusively than any one else now writing fiction that English prose can be unmistakably modern without having to be either ugly or cold.
The fine fusion of Mr. Galsworthy’s narrative manner as it appears in the ripest of the novels has obviously something to do with his apprenticeship to the stage and his other apprenticeship to the study. The artist who wrote Strife and Justice and The Pigeon was proceeding in the opposite direction from the modern ‘talky’ play, the drama according to Shaw or Brieux; he was practicing the most exigent selective sense on the masses of words, most of them waste, that make up the exchange of even very silent lives. That kind of discrimination is the uppermost quality of the dialogue in the novels, where every word, however aimlessly spoken, figures demonstrably in the march toward a predetermined effect. Shelton of The Island Pharisees uttered a heedless ironic laugh in the presence of Antonio, and would have given, the next instant, anything to recall it; but it had gone from him irrevocably, it had been written black in the history of two lives, it was ‘a little bit of truth.’ Every speech in the best of the novels has that character of profound and irrevocable importance. Little impulsive utterances betray the secret direction of a whole life. In his dialogue Mr. Galsworthy shows himself the dramatist incarnate.
No more has his training as essayist and critic missed transference to his fiction. The same kind of condensed emphasis that gives so much meaning to the tiny and fragile miniatures in such volumes as A Motley, A Commentary, and The Inn of Tranquillity, appears in the chapters of The Man of Property and of Fraternity. It is partly what enables the author to make his larger canvases accommodate so many figures without the appearance of crowding; and it is what enables him to practice on the redundant form of the modern realistic novel that sort of rigid selectiveness which we associate with the short story. The play and the sketch (one the poster, the other the pastel of letters) make equal war on waste; and a pen trained to their type of compression will be able, in the wider area of the novel, to make little stand for much, for everything.
II
Both halves of this double training appear in Mr. Galsworthy’s special contribution to the form of the novel: his perfection of the separate chapter as a unit in mood, in episode, and usually in scene. His composition in the novel is essentially dramatic rather than epic; it consists of a series of dramatic nuclei or kernels, careful foreshortenings of the subject-matter. He does not so much try to give the history of his personæ in a continuous line or curve as to plot it by a dotted line. Each dot is a chapter dedicated to one episode, the episode so chosen that it implies its own past and future, as a figure in paint or stone may imply in one frozen attitude the action of preceding and succeeding moments.
Henry James, practicing his invariable motto of ‘Dramatize, dramatize!’ achieved somewhat the same form with his chapter; but he never fully escaped the necessity of filling in the gaps. He sketched the connection between one chapter and the preceding, and then elaborated his central episode. Mr. Galsworthy elaborates his central episode and leaves out the connection — which means that the episode is in itself more decisive, more crowded with self-explaining relations. Each of his chapters has its own unity of mood, its exquisite symmetrical finish, with an almost complete freedom from the extraneous—the preparation and exposition, the backing and filling, which we are accustomed to think of as the necessary evils of the fictional art. Each episode has the singleness of effect, the ‘dramatic crystallization,’of a short story by de Maupassant; it is like a skillful and separately complete sketch.
We are familiar elsewhere with chapters of all sorts, their structure determined by a crucial event, by pure chronology, by pure caprice of the author, even by the most tawdry exigencies of serial publication; and most novels remind one, in their succession of chapters, of a serried and irregular chain of mountains. Mr. Galsworthy turns the chain of mountains into a chain of beads, all of them strung on the invisible thread of the story and all consisting of a skillfully manufactured alloy of setting, action, character, talk, and dominant mood. The units are much the same in size and contour. What saves the succession of them from monotony is that the artificer, a master of color and contrast, has given each its own tint of mood, so that, although they are alike in form, no two are the same in effect.
We look also to Mr. Galsworthy’s training, his mastery of the drama and of the short narrative sketch, for the explanation of his fundamental difference in method from both Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett, his nearly exact contemporaries. Mr. Wells offers with the freest, most open-handed generosity the acceptable gift of his experiences, his versatile mind, his views, himself; Mr. Bennett holds out, in the same amazing, inexhaustible quantities, his preëmpted property, the Five Towns, their characteristic life cut out for us in great segments and slabs of actuality. Both writers stand as exponents of the artistic theorem that the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts; TonoBungay and Marriage, Clayhanger and The Old Wives’ Tale mean simply what they are. The worth is in the mass or bulk; we evaluate quantitatively. The question is, How much life? or, How wide a range of life? — never, What does it mean?
Not so with Mr. Galsworthy. What he gives us is not so readily reducible to a summary. But it consists, one can say with certainty, of something which is other than it seems — some phase of life first carefully isolated, then colored and displayed in the light of an artistic purpose and left to explain itself, not as so much human experience transcribed bodily, but as a representation of something outside and greater than itself.
Mr. Galsworthy stands, then, as an instance of the opposite theorem, in art equally valid, that the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. What he means is to be sought outside, not inside, what he says. He has learned to a nicety the art of making all that he reports far-reaching in its power of suggestion. The reported spoken word or physical act, the glimpse of truth or of passion, represents or illustrates something not directly expressed at all. We do not mean that Mr. Galsworthy falls short of having mastered the external or factual truth of the social order about which he writes: one always has a comfortable enough sense of his safe clutch of the real. But familiarity with the facts is not everything; the amount of truth is not to be measured by the amount of material. Galsworthy chooses details, not to be added up into the sum-total of his meaning, but to point in the direction of it; and he needs no more of them than will serve to point unmistakably. One has in reading him a distinct impression of the mass from which his comparatively few details are sifted. He possesses, it may be to an extent never before seen in the English novel, the power of making a few deft and insignificant touches suggest a whole picture of mood or of character, a whole philosophy of life. If he has any rival in this respect, that rival must be Stevenson, a romancer — between whom and the avowed realist of modern social living, any comparison is intelligible only in so far as it is purely technical and academic.
III
The meaning, or message, of Mr. Galsworthy we shall have summarized if we call him the critic of the static element in society — that is, of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie — from the point of view of the dynamic or revolutionary element. Mr. Galsworthy writes of the aristocracy that is founded, not on bestness but on badges — all the insignia of class which exert a restraining force on the individual, the badges of property and social rank and family which apply to the grandson an enormous pressure toward the ideals and instincts of the grandfather, and which make the man of the younger generation more responsive to the dictates of his own kind than to the urgency of shifting conditions in the world. In other words, Mr. Galsworthy is the analyst of the ornamental and property-holding classes and of the forces that keep them within their own social and intellectual fences. He sees them solving new problems with old formulas that no longer fit, and imposing on the individual the unyielding ideal of conformity, at whatever cost, to the individual’s own instinct.
Thus he presents both the strength and the weakness of material aristocracy in England. Its strength is that it nearly always triumphs over the waywardness of the non-conforming individual, breaking his will, and sometimes his heart, as it draws him back within the safe barriers of class. Its weakness is that it is based on conventions instead of on needs; the instinct of conformity means simply that aristocrats must stand together in order to stand at all. The aristocrat as Mr. Galsworthy pictures him is the blind mouth of society; the revolutionist or radical democrat is the hungry eye. One keeps what he has, assuming, just because he has always had it, that it is what he wants; the other wants the truth, and wants the aristocrat to have it too.
Perhaps indeed the weakness of the revolutionist’s case is his insistence that the aristocrat shall throw away something he already has for the sake of the truth, whereas the revolutionist himself, having nothing, is already free for the service of the truth. Certainly this disparity does its part toward explaining the inability of the two classes ever fundamentally to understand each other. Unlike the professional reformer, Mr. Galsworthy sees the disparity, and sees it as tragic. And if he depicts the aristocracy as a system of limitations, inhibitions, blindnesses through the will not to see, — a system fostered by heredity, by tradition, by self-interest, above all by the tremendous force of inertia, — he also depicts revolution as a force constantly overleaping itself, and losing all because it demands more than is in the nature of things.
For an exposition of Galsworthy’s general doctrine, his definition of the aristocrat, one should read the introduction to his first novel of some permanent importance, The Island Pharisees, a document in which he describes his view of the social unrest, the central and all-important conflict of which all other conflicts about particular issues are simply the less important phases. That unrest means, to him, the clash of two temperamentally dissimilar beliefs about society: Whatever is, is right, and Whatever is, is wrong. The conflict is always waged about the status quo of the given moment, the aristocrat fighting to maintain and the revolutionist to abolish.
The battle is first of all one of temperaments, as we have said. The aristocrat loves safety, the approval of his own sort, the straight walled road laid for him even before he existed, the regularized and shielded life of conventions and formulas. The radical loves danger, swimming against the stream, the life of the free body, with no responsibilities except those which seem at the moment to exert the strongest claim. He is always responding to something obscurely present in his make-up, that compels him to hate and fight whatever is entrenched, whatever is conceded without argument or by majorities.
Secondly, the battle is of the intellect; and here the revolutionist has all the advantage. He can see what is wrong with the world, and he can see that the aristocrat will never do anything to diminish the wrong. For the aristocrat is so preoccupied with the means of keeping what he already has, that whatever imperils it seems to him irrelevant. Things are as he wants them, and a number of dangerous malcontents are trying to upset his security and take away the world he has always helped to govern, in order to substitute a different world in which he will be a man like any other, only more helpless. Therefore he sets his jaw against every malcontent, clings tenaciously to everything that reminds him of his own difference, his superiority, the safe and ordered beauty of his world; and he convinces himself that it is the best possible world. His only real argument is that he likes it best — but he does not feel the hollowness of this.
Intellectually, he is on the losing side, because he only thinks that he thinks. But he has on his side, first, an enormous majority, being tacitly supported by the passive, non-thinking, nondynamic mob; and, secondly, he has all the machinery of finance and commerce, of law and government, of institutions and religion, to help him win. Against these, the intellectual minority of rebels can urge only the logic and courage of its convictions. And in battles of ideas, the side that is numerically weak never wins — at first. The truth has not prevailed until it is everybody’s truth, even the aristocrat’s; but by that time it has ceased to be urgent, and the battle begins all over again on more advanced ground, over a new idea of which the aristocrat has, as ever, the safe or accepted notion.
Thus the rebel thinker becomes at last the accepted prophet of what everybody believes; but meanwhile the rebel himself has gone on into the future, shaking from his feet the dust of the present. He is the creative element, the leaven in society; and aristocracy is the resisting mass which he leavens. The aristocrat is always coming to the position which the radical has lately abandoned; the two are always a generation or two apart in belief and instinct, and the day of mutual understanding never dawns.
Some such relation as this between the creative and the sterile elements in society is what Mr. Galsworthy perceives and uses as the nuclear principle of his social philosophy; and, as a principle, leaving aside for the moment his particular applications of it, it is one of the eternal verities, tritely fixed in the saying that the world always crucifies its Messiahs. The world embraces the gospel that its Messiahs once preached, without stopping to reflect that if they should come again they would preach a quite different gospel, equally remote from anything that the world is ready to accept.
Of course Mr. Galsworthy is not offering either himself or any one of his imagined revolutionists as a Messiah: we only state his doctrine, in paraphrase of his own general terms, in order to show that his work has an unshakable foundation of important truth, the truth of how light is propagated, society leavened. The more practical question for criticism concerns the superstructure which Mr. Galsworthy raises on that foundation. Meanwhile, the wonder is that an art based on so vast a truism should be in its detail so free from grandiloquence, the large gesturing and the mouth-filling words of the enthusiast; that it should never fall short of sobriety and symmetry. For it is not every philosopher who, having declared war on exaggeration and distorted emphasis, knows how to pay the truth the high compliment of simply telling it.
IV
Mr. Galsworthy states his large truth, as a fact, in terms of workably small and quite usual social problems, mostly of the sort that involve the members of a single family. The struggle takes place between the aristocratic forces that tend to hold the given family together as a unit and the democratic forces that tend to break its organization and throw the individual members on their own resources. The representatives of those forces make up two of the three groups of Mr. Galsworthy’s personæ; the human prizes for which they contend, usually members of the younger generation, are the third. On one side are the exponents and apologists of conservatism, of the established order — men of substance, fathers and mothers who have forgotten the stresses of their youth, uncles and match-making mammas, clergymen, society matrons, and a few persons of the young generation who were born old in spirit — such folk as Old Jolyon and Soames Forsyte in The Man of Property, Pendyce pére in The Country House, Frances Freeland in The Freelands, Lady Casterley in The Patricians, and Antonia in The Island Pharisees. Opposed to them are rebels against their way of thinking and of living, the intruders and upstarts, dangerous and unsettling folk — persons such as Ferrand and Courtier and Derek Freeland among the men, Mrs. Bellew and the obscurely dangerous Mrs. Noel among the women. Between these, allied by birth and training to the aristocratic order but blown upon by new winds of doctrine and caught in the surge of young individualism, are the youths and maidens whom we see drawn in two directions, until finally they are forced back into conformity or, by rare exception, thrust beyond the pale — such protagonists as Shelton, George Pendyce, Irene Forsyte, and Lord Miltoun and Lady Barbara, these last in The Patricians.
It is significant of Mr. Galsworthy’s rather sombre sense of what it costs to see the truth without having the courage or the genius to follow it, that the persons of this third group, who are the heroes and heroines, are almost invariably the victims. They have seen the truth, in glimpses, but the truth has not made them free. Whichever way they go, they leave more behind than the heart and the intelligence can spare. If they return to the fold, they have given up the captaincy of their own destinies, the thrill of adventure which turns existence into living; if they leave the fold, they are wholly lost and incapable of grappling with life, they cannot do what they have never done, or do without what they have always had.
This is the principal indictment of the aristocratic formula: it procreates beings who are capable of seeing its limitations but incapable of overcoming them — sons and daughters who crave adventure of the mind and heart, yet have no strength for the ways of adventure. The outcome is always tragedy, if only the tragedy of self-fulfillment denied and thwarted. The plight which Mr. Galsworthy most often analyzes is that of the person who wants more than he can get and dreams more than he dares. Condemned by his own nature to hunger for the untrammeled life, such a person is condemned by his environment to act as though life were prearranged for him. He takes the paved road, with chafing and discontent. And he does not see how surely another thirty years will find him helping to reënact his own tragedy in his children, wrestling to hold their bodies and incidentally losing their souls just as his elders had done with him. For there is no reactionary so rigid as he who has once been an insurgent.
This theme, the impingement on each other of two opposed doctrines and temperaments, is what Mr. Galsworthy works out in four of his most significant novels. These four taken together, each of them presenting a separate phase of the general conflict, complete the pattern of Mr. Galsworthy’s satire. In The Island Pharisees he satirizes the aristocratic class through what it believes; in The Man of Property through what it possesses; in The Country House through what it does; and in The Patricians through what it inherits. These are the four phases of the aristocratic limitation — inability to believe any truth except that which is palatable and flattering; inability to part with anything that is one’s own, even if one no longer seriously needs or wants it; inability to act outside the limited field where one’s reputation is safe among one’s own kind; and inability to escape the predestination in one’s blood, the still voice of elders and ancestors inexorably ruling one’s life. By his philosophy, his property, his conduct, and his heredity, the four fences of his narrow predetermined square, the aristocrat is cut off from the mass of mankind, the large ‘community of hopes and fears’ which merges the solidarity of tribe or clan or class in the solidarity of nation or race or, at the largest interpretation, of mankind.
In each of the four books, all these instincts are present and potent; for Mr. Galsworthy is too great an artist, and too well aware of the complex of human emotions and motives, to interpret any single group of lives as ruled exclusively by one impulse. But he makes one of the four impulses visibly predominate in each of his four groups. Antonia breaks with Shelton because it is impossible for her to agree with the young revolutionist Ferrand, Shelton’s protégé, with whom she sees Shelton more and more agreeing. Ferrand is to her like a destructive principle, the Nemesis of the class she represents. She does not see how Shelton can find any light or truth in him; for to her he is darkness. Antonia’s instinctive hatred of the truth, her pharisaical assurance that any light she does not see is darkness, is Mr. Galsworthy’s kind of evil. In The Man of Property it is Soames Forsyte’s habit and need of ownership that makes him regard his wife as essentially property. She never means much to him until he faces the prospect of losing her; but then he holds her with all his ruthless strength, wounded, full of hatred, yet unable to forego the long habit of mastery, of possession. In The Country House it is the fear of losing caste, the dread of what people will say, that eventually drags George Pendyce back to his family and Mrs. Bellew back to her husband. And in The Patricians it is the austere claim of an inherited something in the blood that, more than any other cause, separates Lady Barbara from Courtier and make Lord Miltoun renounce Mrs. Noel for his career.
These four groups are enough alike, as types of the aristocrat, to be caught in the same mesh of impulses and traditions. They are enough different so that for each group one particular strand of the mesh seems st ronger than the others. It takes the four together to provide Mr. Galsworthy’s full documentation of the reactionary class, the class that possesses the material power of the world. Each of the books is a finished and vivid picture of personality. The four together have the strength and the impersonal logic of a composite picture — a definition of the type from which the several individuals derive their being.
V
We have not meant, even by implication, to present Galsworthy as being, like Shaw, a destructive critic of the family as an institution. He happens to choose the family as the fighting ground for the two extreme social doctrines in which he is interested; and in every instance the triumph of the doctrine which he regards as relatively right would involve the disorganization of a certain kind of family. But his attack is not against the idea of the family: it is against the principle of solidarity on which that one family is based. Mr. Galsworthy does not see how two loyalties that conflict can both be right; and he is always interested in the larger loyalty. He attacks the solidity of the family group when it interferes with the solidity of mankind. The ruthlessness of his gospel that the individual must be free for humanity is the ruthlessness of Christianity, which requires that a man hate his own flesh, his own kindred, or anything that blocks the larger outlook.
This ruthlessness is of the intellect; for after all, the unique trait of Mr. Galsworthy — unique, we mean, among adverse critics of the aristocratic system — is his tenderness for the helpless individual aristocrat. The trouble with the folk in his world is not the presence of vices, or even the absence of the mild negative virtues. The trouble is their lack of the positive and courageous virtues — the power to think, to grow, to give themselves, to act outside what they have been taught. It is as symptoms that these persons are terrible; for as persons many of them are lovable enough. Antonia and Lady Barbara among the women are great in their capacity for personal sacrifice: it is when called upon for the impersonal sacrifice of prejudice that they neither hear nor answer. Old Jolyon Forsyte and Mr. Horace Pendyce are lovable figures, with all their old-school crustiness; Old Jolyon’s tenderness for June is as Mr. Galsworthy’s tenderness for him, and one does not soon forget Mr. Pendyce’s acute suffering for the beasts which perished before his eyes in the burning barn, or his appreciation of his friend of many years, the spaniel John. In his wife Margery we see the mother quite turning the aristocrat out of doors: she wants her son to have what he wants, whatever it does to the family and the system — because she cannot bear to see him suffer. Her one charming insurrection against her husband shows us plainly enough the source of the rebellious streak in George Pendyce. Lady Casterley in The Patricians has every kind of greatness except the ability to see that other people’s concerns are as important and as real to them as hers are to her. It is only when her plans for the well-being of others are thwarted that she becomes hard, unsparing, inexorable. These are all good folk, most of them gentle and engaging folk, spoiled for the larger purposes of the world by the ineffaceable imprint of class and class limitations.
There is something in Mr. Galsworthy’s make-up, a kind of gentility, which prevents him, then, from being a satirist in the vindictive sense. It has to do with his philosophical belief in the community of all living things, his perception that what hurts one hurts all, so that to hurt anything is the only real crime. That belief prevents him from taking with even the unloveliest of his characters the tone of scorn. The unloveliest of his characters, we suppose, is the Reverend Hussell Barter, a sample of the modern hide-bound ecclesiastical Pharisee; yet he is shown at least twice, despite his innate caddishness, in circumstances where he appears as human and rather admirable.
And this general diffusion of tenderness, the substitution of sympathy for scorn, accords with Mr. Galsworthy’s temperament as well as with his philosophy. It is difficult to call to mind another artist who unites so critical a sense of the disastrous and deadening results of class blindness, with so much solicitude for the blind individual. That solicitude reaches downward to the lowliest of living things, upward to the exalted and lonely. Rigidly controlled by the reason, it is one great element of beauty and strength in Mr. Galsworthy’s work. Not so controlled, it makes for beauty and weakness — as we maintain that it does in The Dark Flower, Mr. Galsworthy’s one attempt to show the intimate life of a man’s heart in no light but the glare of its own emotional intensity. There, where inhibitions are in abeyance and sensibility rules unchecked and uncriticised, Mr. Galsworthy is only a part of himself— the most lovable part, not the most permanent.
This solicitude needs to be distinguished with some care from a soft and shallow humanitarianism much in evidence during the last hundred years. For the dominating quality of this novelist’s art is after all, as we have said, impersonality, restraint, a kind of austerity which one can only call Greek. He is neither satirist nor sentimentalist; his irony is not a lash for the individual soul in its moments of inhumanity, but only a sense of the strangeness of the world’s contradictions, and especially of man’s inhumanity to man. There is something in all cruelty that faintly puzzles him; his indignation is provoked, but it is the patient indignation of high courage. There is a sympathy which is pure self-indulgence. Mr. Galsworthy’s purpose is too inflexible for anything of that sort. Like Mr, Wells, he will have the truth at whatever cost; like Mr. Wells, he shows that its cost is sometimes prohibitive. But he differs from Mr. Wells in that he does not make an insistently selfish personal necessity of the truth. He keeps himself and his desires out of the actual spectacle; his personality is present only as the interpretation of the spectacle, the conclusion we are forced to draw. The result is a number of lives that seem to live themselves intensely in our sight, quite unconscious that they are there for a purpose. The purpose is outside them; their very blindness helps us to see their significance more clearly. Mr. Wells’s characters act more in terms of ideas, Mr. Galsworthy’s more in terms of temperament and desire. One puts all his ideas into his books, usually into the mouths of his personæ. The other leaves his ideas to be gathered by us readers if we want them; and the result is that the ideas seem, not like one side of an argument, but like an inevitable part of the nature of things. This security of Mr. Galsworthy in the possession of a kind of truth so irresistible that it proves itself, gives his work its restraint, its air of calm and impersonal conviction — the Greek austerity and something of the Greek sense of inevasible Fate.
VI
It is rather difficult, in the face of these gifts of sound thinking, fine workmanship, and still finer conscience, to state the reason why Mr. Galsworthy has not also more of the Greek immensity and grandeur. For, after all, the chief limitation of his work — a limitation none the less felt because indefinable— is a certain slenderness of effect. It has every attribute of fine imaginative literature,—excellence of style, consummate mastery of formal technique, an adequate purpose, fervor and intensity, a sympathetic appeal to the most different types of readers, — and yet it achieves on the whole less than we should expect of the elemental bigness which we feel in the great Victorians, in Balzac, in Hardy and Meredith.
This feeling that the great enduring masterpieces leave with us has no necessary connection with mere bulk or largeness of scale, for we feel it in a chapter of The Pickwick Papers just as much as we do in the whole of David Copperfield. All one can say is that it is the most elemental type of creativeness that gives this feeling, and that probably nothing else can give it. It takes its shape usually in the creation of characters who are intrinsically great, even if they are only great villains like Iago, or great clowns like Falstaff, or great fools like Micawber. It is a lawless faculty, or at least it is a lawmaking rather than a law-abiding. It creates out of the void, reproducing whenever it drives the pen something of the original cosmic creation.
This thing, whatever its name and composition, Mr. Galsworthy does not have in the most eminent degree. His novels are almost certainly better literature than those of any one else now writing novels, if one judges them apart from this triumphant greatness which belongs to the immortals. In artistic dignity, in the author’s attitude toward his subject, in the worth of that subject, in knowledge of life and the philosophy of it, every one of them since The Island Pharisees is a masterpiece, and in some ways the latest of them, The Freelands, is greatest of all. Yet we doubt whether any reader marks an epoch in his intellectual life by his discovery of Galsworthy, as many a reader does by his discovery of Hardy, of Meredith, of Dostoïevski. One speaks of this undefined lack with some hesitancy, just because it is and shall remain undefined: yet speak of it one must. So far as we can lay a finger on the lack, its secret is that Mr. Galsworthy applies the exquisite tracery of his workmanship to characters who are essentially little. Perhaps there must be a glorious unreason in the creations of genius at its most splendid; perhaps Mr. Galsworthy is too completely and sanely master of himself to be the father of a Tartuffe, a Père Goriot, an Uncle Toby, a Becky Sharp, an Evan Harrington, a Tess. There is everything in Mr. Galsworthy to make us wish his novels came oftener, provided only they could do so without suffering in quality; but there is nothing to guarantee that readers of fifty years hence will turn to him as readers now turn to Dickens. In him the epic sweep is replaced by the lyric intensity.
Nevertheless, it is true that his is one of the most needed, as well as one of the most gracious, voices that speak to this generation. The aristocratic prides and the aristocratic fears, they are a part of nearly all of us; they are no more the limitations of one small class than the aristocratic virtues are the advantages of one small class. Pendyces and Forsytes lead the way, set up the ideal — and the whole mass is infected with ‘Pendycitis’ and ‘Forsyteism.’ For the average man and woman, of America as well as of England, there is plenty of need for self-examination; we are all in some degree Island Pharisees, creatures of the narrow and selfish outlook.
Against these limitations of the mass of us, only reason can prevail. And it is the voice of reason that Mr. Galsworthy raises. He assails the convention that destroys, not the convention that builds and protects. Unreason, blindness, excess, these are the real enemies. Some of us are idle, others overworked; some are voluptuous, others ascetic; some have useless wealth, others only grinding poverty; some are brainless, others fanatical; these excesses, fruits of unreason, are what must be destroyed. Mr. Galsworthy happens to believe that the really crucial trouble with society is at the top of its organization, in the land-holding, money-spending, governing classes; but he never goes at the question in a blind iconoclastic fury. His aim is to make those who are blind see the tragedy, and the humor too, of their own blindness — for to him the most grotesque tragedy of all is, not to know one’s self and what one wants, to pass perhaps a whole lifetime without ever having been on speaking terms with one’s own heart. ‘From your heart,’ he apostrophizes Fashion, the Figure Without Eyes, ‘ well up the springs that feed the river of your conduct; but your heart is a stagnant pool that has never seen the sun. . . . You have never had a chance!' That is the position of the unhappy majority in his books. The only free, happy, and enviable people in them are the few who have selfknowledge, convictions with the courage of them, work, and little or nothing else. In these is the hope of the world.
And hope is the one note that becomes more and more insistent throughout Mr. Galsworthy’s work, emerging strongly at last through his characteristic melancholy. The failures he records are uncompromising; and so too is the failure of youthful and eager iconoclasm in his latest story, The Freelands. But the failure there, we are made to know, is less irretrievable than the others; more wisdom comes out of it for those who fail, and we read it as a preface to hope. ‘Was that defeat of youth, then, nothing? Under the crust of authority and wealth, culture and philosophy — was the world really changing; was liberty truly astir, under that sky in the west all blood; and man rising at long last from his knees before the God of force? . . . The world is changing . . . changing!’