JOHN GALSWORTHY
John Galsworthy
In attempting a personal description of almost any living poet or novelist it is becoming such a customary thing to say he does not look in the least like an author that I am beginning to feel a consuming curiosity to know what an author looks like and what can cause him to look so entirely different from men of other professions that you can tell him for one at a glance. In my own experience, the worst poetry nowadays is written by men of the most picturesquely poetical appearance, and the best by men who are stout, or bald, or of an otherwise commonplace or unattractive exterior. Nor among the many literary persons I have met do I remember meeting even one novelist of genius who looked it. How this myth of the ideal author, the splendid creature carrying his credentials in his face, came into being is not within my knowledge. An old gentleman of my acquaintance who had, in his time, set eyes on Dickens assured me that he was an insignificant little person who might have passed for a retired sea-captain. Thackeray rather resembled a prize fighter who had gone flabby. Trollope, with his paunch and massive beard suggested the country squire. Browning would not have seemed out of place as a bank manager, and though Tennyson was said to look a typical poet, he really looked much more like a typical stage brigand.
The fact is that while other trades and professions have developed recognizable characteristics in such as follow them, literature has naturally failed to do that. For men are drawn into it from all sections of the community and there is no more reason that they should conform to a family likeness than that they should each write the same kind of books. They do not even, in appearance, live up to the books they write. Stanley Weyman looks as unromantic as Austin Chamberlain; that daring realist George Moore gazes on you with the blue-eyed innocence of a new curate; and the mild and gentle aspect of Thomas Burke does not harmonize with the violence and grim horrors of his tales of Chinatown.
In a word, no two authors look alike; as a race, they have even given up trying to achieve a superficial uniformity by growing long hair and, when they have any, cut it to an orthodox length. A few cultivate the mustache; not many indulge in whiskers; the majority are clean shaven; and in this they are not peculiar, for the same, in the same proportions, may be said of their readers. Therefore, when at a recent dinner a lady sitting next to me surveyed John Galsworthy, who was seated opposite, and remarked, “You could guess he was an author—he looks so like one,” I anxiously enquired, “Which one?” and was, perhaps not undeservedly, ignored.
If she had said he looked like an indefinite intellectual; that his countenance was modeled on noble and dignified lines; that it expressed at once shrewdness and benignity, I could have understood and agreed with her. But these qualities are so far from being infallibly the birthright of the author that they are seldom apparent in him. With his firm, statuesque features, his grave immobility, his air of detachment and distinction, the calm deliberation of his voice and gesture, Galsworthy embodies rather what we have come to regard as the legal temperament. It is not difficult to imagine him in wig and gown pleading earnestly, impressively, but without passion, or, appropriately robed, summing up from the bench sternly, conscientiously, and with the most punctilious impartiality.
Consequently, it was without surprise I heard the other day, for the first time, that he had studied for the Bar and became, in his early years, a barrister, though he did not practice. Nor is this legal strain to be traced only in his personal aspect and bearing; it asserts itself as unmistakably and often with considerable effectiveness throughout his novels and plays. He has the lawyer’s respect for fact and detail; he must have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and this gives his stories a certain aridity; a hardness as well as clearness of outline. The ways of the impressionist are not his ways; he omits nothing, but is as precise, as exact in developing plot and character as a lawyer is in getting up a case. He is not satisfied merely to paint portraits of his men and women, he analyses them meticulously, tells you every little thing about them and their families and friends, their taste in food and dress and furniture, shows them in their domestic relations, in their business activities, inventories their virtues and vices and material surroundings with a completeness that leaves nothing unexplained and affects the reader with an extraordinary sense of the reality of it all. If he is recording a funeral he will take care to tell you “the hearse started at a foot’s pace; the carriages moved slowly after.” You might have been trusted to assume that this would be the order of the procession, but nothing is assumed, the thing has got to be described just as it happened. You are then told who was in each carriage, and note is made of the thirteenth carriage which follows at the very end “containing nobody at all.” That is the Galsworthy method. When he relates, in “The Man of Property,” that the young architect, Bosinney, is building a house in the country for Soames Forsyte he does not slur things and content himself with generalities but acquaints you with the size, design and cost of the house, its architectural peculiarities, and the point is that all these particulars are strictly relevant and serve to reveal more intimately the characters and idiosyncrasies of Bosinney and of Soames, and have their significance in the unfolding of that poignant tragedy of Soames’s wife.
As the historian of later Victorian upper middle-class life in England, Galsworthy is the legitimate successor of Anthony Trollope. He is as true a realist as Trollope without the reticence imposed on the Victorian writer by his period; but Trollope’s style was exuberant, slipshod, obese, like himself, and Galsworthy’s, like himself, is lean, subdued, direct, chary of displaying emotion; he observes a close economy in the use of words, despite the length of his books. In common with most of his contemporary novelists, Trollope was something of a moralist; he handled from a sensible, man-of-the-world point of view divers religious, financial and domestic problems of the time that lent themselves to his purposes as a teller of stories. But the problems that interested him were those that had to be faced by the well-to-do and the respectable; he had no particular sympathy for the lower orders and little contempt, good-humored or otherwise, for the vulgar folk who had earned their own money, climbed up from the depths, and were awkwardly trying to breathe and flutter in the refined air of good society.
He had a nice feeling for sentiment, and lapsed carelessly into sentimentality. Galsworthy is generally too controlled and self-conscious to do that. But if his irony and satire are keener-edged than his predecessor’s, his sympathies are broader and deeper. He is a humanitarian whose sense of brotherhood extends to birds and the animals described as dumb. On the one hand, he understands and has compassion for the under-dog, the poor, the humble; and on the other, though he can smile, as in the three novels that make up his greatest achievement, “The Forsyte Saga,” and elsewhere—and smile with a sardonic humor—at the outlook and pretensions of those old prosperous families who move in the best circles and, comfortably materialistic, have, in place of a sense of brotherhood, acquired an ineradicable sense of property in their wives, money, houses, he is not blind to the finer human qualities that underlie their inherited social conventions. In two of his dramas, “Strife,” and “The Skin Game,” he handles the eternal struggle between capital and labor, and the conflict of interests between a wealthy parvenu and an impoverished patrician with such an honest balancing of wrongs and rights, such sedulous impartiality, that you can scarcely say at the end which side retains most of his sympathy.
He takes life too seriously, it seems, to be able to write stories or plays for their own sake; he writes them to expose moral or economic evils of his time, to advocate reforms in our social organization; the crude barbarity of our prison system; the tyranny of the marriage law; the hypocrisies of religion and orthodox morality; the vanity of riches; the fatuity of all class inequalities—with him the creation of character, the fashioning of a tale of individual love, rivalry, ambition, triumph or disaster are generally more or less subordinate to communal or national issues such as these.
It is characteristic of Galsworthy’s reticence that he issued his first three or four novels under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn; and of the genuineness of his democratic ideals that when he had built up a reputation and was offered a knighthood he declined it. It is characteristic, too, of his restrained, deliberate habit of mind that, unlike the generality of writers, he does not seem to have rushed into print until he was old enough to have acquired enough personal experience to draw upon. He was thirty-one when his first novel, “Jocelyn,” was published; and thirty-nine when, in the one year, 1906, he made another and a real beginning as a novelist in his own name with “The Man of Property,” and as a dramatist with “The Silver Box.” The keynote of his work is its profound sincerity. Art and the zeal for reform seldom run in double-harness, but they do when Galsworthy drives.