John Galsworthy

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A review of Caravan

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SOURCE: A review of Caravan, in The Bookman, Vol. 68, No. 404, May, 1925, pp. 114-15.

[Author of the acclaimed novel trilogy Eustace and Hilda (1944-47), Hartley was an English novelist and short story writer whose fiction is unified by the theme of the search for individuality and meaning in the post-Christian era. A literary critic as well, Hartley contributed reviews for many years to the Saturday Review, Time and Tide, the Spectator, and other periodicals. In the following review, he describes the stories in Caravan as inventive, indignant, and at times sentimental.]

An exhausted and pitiable caravan, this of Mr. Galsworthy's, composed of the maimed, the halt and the blind, the victims of circumstance, the victims of themselves—depressed, unsuccessful, down-at-heel, under-dogs nearly all of them. There are fifty-six stories in [Caravan], and nearly a thousand pages; in nearly every story, on nearly every page, the most we see of Happiness is her heels vanishing round a corner. Moments of elation occur and, more rarely, moments of ecstasy; but they are the brief summits of a sharply-declining curve. The caravan catches the sunlight for a second before it plunges into the shadows.

Pathos rather than tragedy is the note of Mr. Galsworthy's tales. He is for ever pitying somebody, and the shorter the story the more pity he contrives to squeeze into it. He manages to engage our sympathy for the most unpromising characters; hard, worldly, merciless as they are, we shed a tear for them simply because they are afflicted with those qualities; we sympathise with them for being so unsympathetic. It is due to Mr. Galsworthy to say that scarcely ever can we resist his humanitarianism, even when (as is not often the case) he preaches it too openly and writes what is perilously near "sob-stuff." He has so much invention and resource, he draws his instances from so far afield, he is familiar with so many modes of living, that his stories escape monotony. Even though, emotionally, the destination may vary little, the route is always different, and Mr. Galsworthy has a chameleon-like power of identifying himself with his surroundings. He is a countryman in the country; a townsman in the town; in the directors' board-room or the flower-seller's attic he seems equally at home. Thus if his impressions sometimes lack unexpectedness and the charm of freshness, they have a maturity and a reliability which wear better in the end. No contemporary writer can show the same versatility: Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Eden Philipotts have as many forms of art at their command, but when they leave their beaten track they become explorers and make lucky shots, hit or miss; whereas Mr. Galsworthy would always be indigenous, whether his scene were laid at the equator or the pole.

The stories are grouped in couples, an early one beside a late one, and linked loosely by some common quality of mood. They cover about a quarter of a century; and it is perhaps not fanciful to say that in the earlier pieces Turgenev's influence is uppermost, in the later, Conrad's. Both those writers, of course, preferred to tell their stories indirectly, and from a distance: Conrad because the interposition of an intermediate consciousness gave a depth and flavour and colour; Turgenev because his art demanded a stillness and coherence which could scarcely be achieved by a direct narration of events. When Mr. Galsworthy summons up remembrance of things past, he also makes the flight of time subserve the ends of art, but his medium imposes its own colours, and they are almost invariably autumnal. Time, for him, is not Time the abstraction, but Time with the scythe, Time the destroyer, the subtle thief of youth. He mounts the historian's pinnacle, not to make an impartial survey but to cry "Quantum mutatus!"—and the change is usually for the worse; not merely change, but change and decay. He relates the stories of two men, in one instance a crossing-sweeper, in the other a shoemaker. Already shadows hang over both: the crossingsweeper, though moderately affluent, has before him the alternative of the workhouse or the river; the shoemaker, still prosperous, is beginning to suffer from the competition of machine-made goods. Business or pleasure removes the narrator from the scene; in time he returns to find his friends a little older, a little poorer, a little nearer the breaking-point. Again, after doing all in his power to relieve them, he goes away, returning once more to find the process of mortification a degree or two advanced. And with the fourth or fifth visit of the wanderer they are dead, and their place knows them no more. These are two of the cruder examples of Mr. Galsworthy's almost morbid sense of mortality; in many of the stories it is present only as a flavour of exquisite subtlety. But they show his limitation as a short-story writer; his conception of people as always looking before and after and pining for what is not, instead of living in the present and for the present, which is an instinct of equal strength.

These considerations do not affect Mr. Galsworthy as an artist, for an artist has the right to put upon life whatever interpretation he chooses or his temperament dictates. And it would be particularly unfair and misleading to try to fix a label on work which has, in its subject-matter and its handling, as much diversity and vitality as any that is being written to-day. Many of the stories in Caravan, especially the longer ones, are models of what stories ought to be: delicately written, conscientious, well worked out, amusing, exciting, moving. But the most impressive are those in which the emotion is most restrained or most diffused. Mr. Galsworthy is an emotionalist always, a sentimentalist sometimes, a partisan never. It is this admirable aloofness that sometimes betrays him into sentimentality, as does also the conviction, so common in fine natures, that anyone who is unfortunate and at odds with society is therefore in the right. He appears to resent injustice, but it is suffering that he really minds; he is capable of moral indignation, but he vents it upon systems, not upon individuals. Universally charitable, he will not accept the hard doctrine of personal responsibility, and that is the reason his characters so seldom attain tragic proportions; they are more sinned against than sinning, and the tragic expiation is for them an irrelevance, a meaningless addition to their sufferings. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. He assumes the world to be harsher in its judgments than it really is. Of a street-walker he writes: "Women of her profession are not supposed to have redeeming points." But is this really the case? What modern writer of serious fiction would dare to bring a prostitute into his pages and not endow her with all the virtues, except one, which he would be reluctant to consider a virtue?

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