Galsworthy’s Little Human Comedy
No magazine that comes to this office is looked for more excitedly than Harper’s Weekly. Poetry and Drama is a quarterly event that keeps us in a dignified intensity of expectation; and there are others. But Harper’s is a weekly adventure in the interest of which we haunt the postman. At present it is featuring a series of sketches by Galsworthy—satirical characterizations of those human beings who pride themselves on being “different.” Here is a man who knows himself for a philosopher; here is an “artist”; here is one of those rare individualities so enlightened, so superior, so removed, that there is only one label for him: “The Superlative.”
But it is in The Philosopher that Galsworthy excels himself. It is probably the most consummate satire that has appeared in the last decade:
He had a philosophy as yet untouched. His stars were the old stars, his faith the old faith; nor would he recognize that there was any other, for not to recognize any point of view except his own was no doubt the very essence of his faith. Wisdom! There was surely none save the flinging of the door to, standing with your back against that door, and telling people what was behind it. For though he did not know what was behind, he thought it low to say so. An “atheist,” as he termed certain persons, was to him beneath contempt; an “agnostic,” as he termed certain others, a poor and foolish creature. As for a rationalist, positivist, pragmatist, or any other “ist”—well, that was just what they were. He made no secret of the fact that he simply could not understand people like that. It was true. “What can they do save deny?” he would say. “What do they contribute to the morals and the elevation of the world? What do they put in place of what they take away? What have they got, to make up for what is behind that door? Where are their symbols? How shall they move and leave the people?” “No,” he said; “a little child shall lead them, and I am the little child. For I can spin them a tale, such as children love, of what is behind the door.” Such was the temper of his mind that he never flinched from believing true what he thought would benefit himself and others. Amongst other things he held a crown of ultimate advantage to be necessary to pure and stable living. If one could not say: “Listen, children, there it is, behind the door. Look at it, shining, golden—yours! Not now, but when you die, if you are good.”... If one could not say that, what could one say? What inducement hold out?...
This is merely the first paragraph. The rest is even better. Such an analysis ought to extinguish the Puritan forever—except that he won’t understand it. He’ll think it was aimed at his neighbor. He knows any number of men like that....