John Galsworthy

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Mr. Galsworthy in War and Peace

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SOURCE: "Mr. Galsworthy in War and Peace," in The New York Times Review of Books, March 28, 1920, p. 139.

[Below, Field commends Galsworthy's attention to beauty in Tatterdemalion.]

If one were to try to sum up in a single word that for which John Galsworthy stands, both in the matter of expression and of creed, it would seem inevitable that the word should be "beauty." Beauty of expression, in the style whose exquisite finish is flowerlike in its all but flawless perfection, yet resembles a hot-house flower in that it is no untrained thing, but at once natural and carefully, skilfully cultivated. Beauty, too, as a creed, expressed in many different books, yet never—to our recollection, at least—so briefly and completely as in the sketch or essay, whichever you may choose to call it, that closes the first section of this volume, "A Green Hill Far Away." There, with the war a thing of the past and peace a blessed fact the author declares, "There are not enough lovers of beauty among men," and that until there shall be "more lovers of beauty in proportion to those who are indifferent to beauty," wars will not cease. No matter what other sterling qualities men may possess; so long as they lack this one they are, and will remain, fighting animals.

The book is divided into two sections, "Of War-Time" and "Of Peace-Time," titles which quite sufficiently explain themselves. And in war, however ugly it may be in many of its aspects, beauty is not always lacking, nor the expression of a beautiful spirit. The reader will have to go far to find, even in Mr. Galsworthy's own works, anything lovelier or more gently, poignantly appealing than the tale which opens the volume—the story of the aristocratic old English lady who became "The Grey Angel" of a French hospital. Told with the utmost simplicity, and that quiet, unerring choice of diction which is the hall-mark of a master, this tale of a rare, brave spirit encased in a frail, outworn body is one of those few which are to be read, and read again, and remembered always. To say that it is the best not only of the section but of the volume, is not to belittle the rest but merely to give this one its due meed of praise.

Perhaps the tale which in some ways approaches "The Grey Angel" the most nearly is the very different "Cafard," the story of a French soldier who had in his brain "the little black beetle which gnaws and eats and destroys all hope and heaven in a man"—"Cafard," they call it. Jean Liotard, lying solitary out upon the grass, and due to appear next day before the authorities who would probably send him back to the Front, told himself that there was "no pity, no God," in the world, but only despair, and "the preying of creatures the one on the other." So he thought he believed, until there came to him—no heavenly vision, but a wretched little black dog. "The Muffled Ship" and "A Green Hill Far Away" are alike in being impressions, reflections of a mood, imagination bringing into contrast with the actual that which is at once its antithesis and its complement. Following the great homecoming ship, the ship of life, the ship of those who have returned, comes slowly creeping the "Muffled Ship" of the grey yearning dead, who will never return any more.

SOLDIERS IN HOSPITALS

Among the other of the fifteen tales and sketches in this section "Of War-Time," several have to do with stray soldiers in the hospitals. There was Gray, who had been a Belgian glass blower, and who, released from a German prison after twenty months because of a half paralyzed tongue—"The boches * * * had put him and two others against a wall and shot those other two"—drifted into a French hospital. At first he wanted to work for France; but soon he asked "only to rest." And then there were the two amusingly different chums, Poirot and Bidan, whose fate was happier than that of Gray. A couple of tales have to do with Germans long resident in England and married to English wives, but not naturalized, men with whose troubles the author sympathizes deeply—more perhaps than the reader will, especially in the case of Holsteig, who had lived twenty years in England and married a Scotch-woman, but was quite ready to have his son join the German army. And the son would have gone to join the forces of the Kaiser, had he been able to get to Germany. "The Peace Meeting," on the other hand, is an excellent bit of irony which will be enjoyed by all but the pacifists.

If the first section has its "Green Hill Far Away," the second contains the no less exquisite "Buttercup Night." It is practically impossible to give any real idea of the sheer loveliness of the descriptions of this night of "frozen beauty," when the moonlight "caught on the dewy buttercups; and across this ghostly radiance the shadows of the yew-trees fell in dense black bars." But curious as it may seem, it is in this second part "Of Peace-Time" that one finds the two tales, which of all those the volume contains, have in them the most of horror—"Manna," and "The Nightmare Child." The story of starving, half-insane clergyman is powerful and very dreadful, but no more dreadful than the story the kindly country doctor tells of the poor girl who was one of those creatures "one simply dare not take notice of, however sorry one may be for them," a story both pitiful and dreadful in its utter hopelessness. There was not, and never would or could be, the shadow of a chance for Em'leen. In this, the narrative differs greatly from that other story of the countryside, "A Strange Thing," the tale of two women, one resembling "a young apple tree with the Spring sun on its blossom," while the other was as incongruous, there amid the beauty of that wonderful Spring day, as the old discarded boot was with the ferns and wild plants among which it had fallen.

CYNICAL AND IDYLLIC

For, like the first part of the volume, the second contains contrasts sharp as black and white—the cynical, dramatic "Two Looks," for instance, and the charming, idyllic "Fairyland"—and because of this it is difficult, if not impossible, to write of the volume as a whole. Indeed, its very title explains how exceedingly varied is its content. But unalike as these tales and sketches are in many ways, they resemble one another in this—that always there is the intense feeling for beauty, the power of divination which penetrates beneath the surface-seeming of the men and women who appear in them, the sure and delicate craftsmanship that enables Mr. Galsworthy to show the reader the thing as he sees it, or so much of it, at least, as the reader is capable of being shown. Among the artists in literature of the present day—and they are not so few as some would like to imagine—those are rare who can safely challenge comparison with the John Galsworthy of Tatterdemalion.

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