However, an author’s point of view is not a fair subject for criticism, any more than the shape of his head; he probably cannot help it. But it may be deplored.
The most striking thing about the book itself is the subdivision titled Studies in Extravagance. Here we have some remorseless, if only partial, truth—the fierce glow of the searchlight, more concentrated though more limited than the wide shining of the sun. We have The Writer, The Housewife, The Plain Man, etc., all pierced through to their most startling worst. Galsworthy will make no concessions—he will not show us a single motherly redeeming virtue in that woman of schemes and covert horribleness whom he presents as a possible variety of British matron. So too with his Writer—those flickers of amiable naivety which occasionally humanise the writers most of us know are shut out from this portrait of an ape playing with the ABC. It is clever, fierce, vindictive, and partly true.
There are some gentler sketches in the book—for instance, the name-piece, in which we have a really witty and typical picture of an American, with his God’s own gift of admiring good deeds he will not do himself. There is also Abracadabra, in which the satire is fundamentally tender, and with little significant bitterness—though in time one comes to resent Galsworthy’s inalienable idea that every woman is ill-used in marriage. There is also such genuine wit, terseness, and point in Hall Marked that one can afford to skip the humours of the parson’s trousers. Ultima Thule is more in The Motley and Commentary vein. We are glad to meet the old man who could tame cats and bullfinches. But why sigh over him so much? He was happy and to be envied, even though he lived in a back room on a few farthings. This misplaced pity is becoming irritating in Galsworthy. His earlier works—Strife, The Man of Property—are innocent of it, but lately it has grown to be a habit with him. He cannot resist the temptation to weep over everyone whose clothes are not quite as good as his own.
It is scarcely surprising that a writer with Galsworthy’s sense of words and atmosphere should have written a book of verse—the only surprise is that his solitary experiment in poetry should not have been more successful. When we remember the exquisite prose of his plays, novels and sketches, the admirable description, the sense of atmosphere, not forgetting also the genuine poetry of much of The Little Dream, we are surprised not to find in Moods, Songs and Doggerels, anything of permanent quality, or worthy to stand beside his other work. There are some delightful songs of the country, of Devon, one or two little fragrant snatches, like puffs of breeze. But the more ambitious pieces, the Moods, are for the most part wanting in inspiration. They are just prose, and not nearly such fine prose as we have a right to expect from Galsworthy. One or two stand out as poetry, and these are mostly studies in atmosphere, such as Street Lamps:
“Lamps, lamps! Lamps ev’rywhere!
You wistful, gay, and burning eyes,
You stars low-driven from the skies
Down on the rainy air.
You merchant eyes, that never tire
Of spying out our little ways;