Indeed Galsworthy can hardly be called a “popular” writer. I am not using the word in a contemptuous sense, but to describe a writer who is widely read. Galsworthy will never be widely read, for he alienates two important sets of readers—those who insist that a book shall teach them something, and those who with equal force insist that it shall teach them nothing. He fails the first class because, while supplying its demands, he does not satisfy the conditions it imposes. He undoubtedly has something to teach, but he avoids the direct appeal, which is what the public wants. Direct and open championship is the only way of making a cause popular—let us be broad-minded, by all means, but agreeing that “there may be something to say on the other side” is very different from finding out what that something is, and saying it. Also he is too sensitive, too moderate, too well balanced to please the “improvement-above-all-things” reader, whose perceptions are not of the subtlest.

On the other hand, he puts himself out of touch with those who do not want to be taught, because he undoubtedly has a propaganda, and is not an artist purely for art’s sake. Between himself and the numbers who would unhesitatingly admire him as a man of letters he raises the barrier of ideas which, while too subtly expressed to satisfy those who clamour for instruction, are quite decided enough to cut off those who object to it.

Thus Galsworthy’s public is whittled down to those who either are in sympathy with his aims and methods—and there must be few who understand both—or are able to swallow a small amount of propaganda for the sake of art. He sets out to write deliberately for no man—he does not recruit his readers, they are volunteers. They come to him from widely different camps, and concentrate in an admiration which is perhaps as full of reserves as its object.

He has deliberately rejected all public-snatching tricks, revealing his personality in his work alone, avoiding the light of popular curiosity and journalistic enterprise. He has treated his private life as his own concern, not as a bait for readers. A judicious use of his own personality and private affairs is, broadly speaking, indispensable to the seeker after popularity. Galsworthy, by disliking this, has necessarily limited his public to those who read him for his work’s sake.

In the bare facts of his life that he chooses to give we shall find nothing so interesting as what we find in his books and plays. Born in 1867, at Coombe in Surrey, he was educated at Harrow and at Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1890, but practised very little.

He has travelled a great deal, and widely—America and Egypt, Canada and the Cape, British Columbia and Australia, Russia and the Fiji Islands. It was on the sailing ship which carried him from Adelaide to South Africa twenty-two years ago that he made friends with a sailor who now, as Joseph Conrad, has a fame equal to Galsworthy’s own. It is remarkable that, in spite of these wide wanderings, his plays and novels should almost invariably have an English background. Seldom, if ever, does he go afield, and then it is only to some place more or less known to everyone, such as Austria in Villa Rubein, The Dark Flower, and The Little Dream. He has never, like Conrad, given us the fruit of his voyagings on the far seas, or his tracks over Russian and Canadian plains.

Perhaps this may be due to the fact that no matter how far he may have wandered, his roots are English. Though born in Surrey, he is a Devon man. Galsworthy is of course a well-known Devon name, and for many years now he has lived in Devon, on the eastern rim of Dartmoor.

Again and again he gives Devon to us—there is A Man of Devon, with its tender freshness of the Devon soil sweetening the strength of Devon hardihood; there is A Bit o’ Love, with its living and poetic conception of Place; and there is The Patrician, with all the breadth of the moors in contrast with the littleness of human passion and human reasoning. Again, too, in Riding in Mist, we have a picture of a mood of the Devon tors which has seldom been equalled and never surpassed. Also his Moods, Songs and Doggerels is full of the county, its scenery, its men and women, its dialect, its rains, its “heather gipsy” wind. Though Galsworthy is certainly not an interpreter of place, though his great novels and plays deal with the mysteries of human nature rather than with local subtleties—and the atmosphere he sheds over his work is general rather than particular, the spirit rather than the ghost—one feels that Devon is the background of his dreams.

THE PLAYS
I

Galsworthy takes his place in modern literature chiefly by virtue of his plays. Criticism may to a certain extent damage him as a novelist, but the most searching critics cannot leave him anything less than a great playwright. His talents are specially adapted to the dramatic form, which at the same time does much to veil his weak points. His mastery of technique nowhere shows to greater advantage than on the stage, nor has he better scope for his true sense of situation; on the other hand, the stage is a legitimate field for propaganda, and the occasional failure of the human interest in his work can be made good by the ability of the actor.