Addresses in America, 1919

by John Galsworthy

I do not know what your chief thought is now; for me the overmastering thought is that of Creation—Re-creation. You know when we look at a bit of moorland where the gorse and heather have been burned—swaled we call it in Devon—how we delight in the green, pushing up among the black shrivelled roots. I long to see the green pushing up, the creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again; each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and not so much that wealth and comfort, as that health and beauty may be born again.

But, confronting as I do to-night, the Arts and Sciences, let me divide my words. You sciences have no need to listen. You have never had such a heyday as this; in engineering, in chemistry, in surgery, in every branch except perhaps ‘star-gazing,’ you have been shooting ahead, earning fresh laurels, putting new discoveries at the service of bewildered Man. Science drags no lame foot, it dances along like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I had better not pursue the simile. But the Arts, with faces muffled to the eyes, stand against the walls of life, and gaze a little enviously, a little mournfully at the passing rout. This is not their time for carnival; their lovers sleep, heavy with war and toil. It is to those poor wallflowers the Arts, that I would speak: Drop your veils, have the courage of your charms; you shall break many a heart yet, make many a lover happy.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have all noticed as I have the difference between a town by daylight and a town by night; well, the daylight town belongs to the Sciences, the night-lit town to the Arts. I don’t mean that artists are night-birds, though I have heard of such a case; I mean that the Arts live on Mystery and Imagination. Have you ever thought how we should get through if we had to live in a town which never put on the filmy dark robe of night, so that hour-in, hour-out we had to stare at things garbed in the efficient overalls of Science, with their prices properly pinned on? How long would it be before we found ourselves in Coney Hatch? Well, we are in a fair way to abolish Night—Mystery and Imagination are ‘off,’ as they say, and that way sooner or later madness lies.

It is time the Arts left off leaning against the wall, and took their share of the dance again. We want them to be as creative, nay, as seductive as the Sciences. We have seen Science work miracles of late; now let Art work her miracles in turn.

People are inclined to smile at me when I suggest that you in America are at the commencement of a period of fine and vigorous Art. The signs, they say, are all the other way. Of course you ought to know best; all the same, I stick to my opinion with British obstinacy, and I believe I shall see it justified.

V
ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

A doubter of the general divinity of our civilisation is labelled ‘pedant.’ Anyone who questions modern progress is tabooed. And yet there is no doubt, I think, that we are getting feverish, rushed, complicated, and have multiplied conveniences to such an extent that we do little with them but scrape the surface of life.

We were rattling into a species of barbarism when the war came, and unless we check ourselves shall continue to rattle now that it is over. The underlying cause in every country is the increase of herd-life, based on machines, money-getting, and the dread of being dull. Everyone knows how fearfully strong that dread is. But to be capable of being dull is in itself a disease.

And most of modern life seems to be a process of creating disease, then finding a remedy, which in its turn creates another disease, demanding fresh remedy, and so on. We pride ourselves, for example, on scientific sanitation; but what is scientific sanitation if not one huge palliative of evils which have arisen from herd-life enabling herd-life to be intensified, so that we shall presently need even more scientific sanitation? The true elixirs vitæ—for there be two, I think—are open-air life, and a proud pleasure in one’s work, but we have evolved a mode of existence in which it is comparatively rare to find these two conjoined. In old countries such as mine, the evils of herd-life are at present vastly more acute than in a new country such as yours. On the other hand, the further one is from hades, the faster one drives towards it, and machines are beginning to run along with America even more violently than with Europe.