John Galsworthy

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Beauty and the Beast

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SOURCE: "Beauty and the Beast," in The Nation, Vol. CX, No. 2859, April 17, 1920, p. 522.

[In the following review of Tatterdemalion, the critic declares some of Galsworthy's stories "among the best of our time, " yet notes limitations of his literary style.]

There is a moving little essay in Mr. Galsworthy's new volume which he calls "A Green Hill Far Away." It is a breath of relief and thanksgiving at the coming of peace. It was written in 1918, and as he permits an untroubled spirit to blend once more with his beloved English countryside, he says "There is Peace again and the souls of men fresh murdered are not flying into our lungs with every breath we draw." Now it is 1920 and such souls are still flying, for hunger is a more cruel murderer than the sword and the sword itself is far from idle. And one wonders whether this wise and truly lofty soul still believes—for this is the central note of the collection—that the world is full of war and hate because "there are not enough lovers of beauty among men." "It all," he continues, "comes back to that. Not enough who want the green hill far away—who naturally hate disharmony and the greed, ugliness, restlessness, cruelty, which are its parents and children." Alas, in 1914 there was Paris, a city that loved beauty, and there was Vienna, whose many, many poets sought only after the green hills and temples of the soul. The love of beauty lingered in Florence and it had come to a new birth in Munich. And men in all those cities that had loved beauty exchanged it for wrath and saw in war and nationalistic passion another, fiercer, and more burning beauty, and poets of all peoples—Brooke and Seeger and Heymel—are rotting somewhere in the old battlefields. Perhaps they loved beauty too much and truth too little. The passions and the myths have an intense beauty of their own until the time of the dreadful harvest. Thought and resistance are cold and solitary.

In Mr. Galsworthy emotion has always been a little stronger than reflection. His very excess of restraint bears witness to that. But his passion for beauty burns with a very steady flame in the fine story "Spindleberries," though even here it is tempered in expression by that "gentillesse" of Chaucer which Mr. Galsworthy recalls to us by his motto and has so carefully cultivated within himself. The war came and, because it wrenched him from his absorption in beauty, stirred him to thought. He himself could not identify his vision of beauty with the crimson of carnage, or fling himself wholly back into the ardors of the tribe. Hence in 1917 he wrote "Cafard" with far-reaching implications that touch both Barbusse and Latzko, and during that year and the next, "Defeat" and "The Bright Side," and finally, in 1919, "The Dog It Was Who Died." And these stories—already dismissed or scoffed at by the red-blooded press—illustrate how those years found his other passion for justice more real and useful in a world of horror than his passion for beauty. "Defeat," the earliest of the stories, makes the fact very clear. For in this account of a German street walker in London he rises to those ultimate perceptions that seek humanity beyond the tribe, see the same qualities and reactions in all tribes, and thus by dispassionate observation and thought reach the only possible haven of peace—a haven of the mind rather than of the heart.

On the side of art Tatterdemalion illustrates the Galsworthian qualities which are quite familiar by this time: a mellowness that never degenerates into softness (unless for a moment in "The Grey Angel" in this very collection); a virile tenderness of tone; an unobtrusive ease in the progression of the narrative; a diction which is always adequate, often beautiful, but which will not or cannot exploit all its own full resources of either beauty or strength through some inflexibility of inner modulation. Not that his prose-rhythm is monotonous. Its range is small like that of a beautiful and cultivated voice dwelling on a few notes and unconscious of the worlds of sound beyond. Some of the short stories here are, with these definite qualities and their defects, among the best of our time. In addition to those named, especially "Spindleberries," there is "Expectations," which, with its robuster undertone and pleasant edge of irony, shows that Mr. Galsworthy, were he to be but a shadow less conscious of the necessity of "gentillesse," could oftener exhibit the unbreathed-on grain of life.

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