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!...