Captures
[In the review below, the critic compares Galsworthy's stories in Captures with the game of cricket, asserting that they both contain a "code of gentility. "]
Reading another Galsworthy short stories, essays or poems book, whether a novel, plays, is like following a team, or a sportsman, in a familiar game, and seeing the supported colors come to the defeat of a gentleman. It is again Galsworthy's code of gentility, of "cricket," against a more material, coarse-fibred world that is revealed in his latest collection of short stories, Captures.
Reference to games in connection with Galsworthy is not to be construed as convicting that fine artist of triviality; it is rather a recognition of a quality held in common—that "inner pluck" which is perhaps the most engaging attribute of the Anglo-Saxon, at work or at play.
It is a world, Galsworthy would seem to be saying, scarcely worth the trouble of carrying on one's back. His characters play at life earnestly and gallantly, with no hope of winning. Persons in Galsworthy's books are developed with that swift selectiveness of his and groomed for their bit of drama—an encounter with some individual or some brute force which is "not quite cricket." The cricketers go down to be frustrated, in a sense, and to have living made intolerable, by the very scrupulousness with which they observe their inbred code. They have not even the satisfaction of being defeated according to the "game."
Galsworthy seldom makes his confession of faith explicit. It is an undercurrent to the statement of his conflicts and becomes apparent by implication in his resolutions. In "A Hedonist," however, there occurs:
The microbe of fatalism, already present in the brains of artists before the war, had been considerablyenlarged by that depressing occurrence. Could a civilization basing itself on the production of material advantages do anything but insure the desire for more and more material advantages? * * * The war had seemed to me to show that mankind was too combative an animal ever to recognize that the good of all was the good of one. The coarse-fibred, pugnacious and self-seeking would, I had become sure, always carry too many guns for the refined and kindly. * * * The simple heroism of mankind, disclosed or rather accentuated by the war, seemed to afford no hope; it was so exploitable by the rhinoceri and tigers of high life. * * * Success, power, wealth—those aims of profiteers and Premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of all, in fact, who could not see God in a dewdrop, hear Him in distant goat bells and scent Him in a pepper tree—had always appeared to me akin to dry rot.
Most of the stories in Captures, as the above quotation would indicate, introduce the World War as Galsworthy's latest instance of the refusal or the inability of the lower orders to play cricket. He subscribes to the amazed discovery of the British Army officer of years' experience in the colonies: "It is not a gentleman's war."
It might appear that Galsworthy had been discovered by this reviewer in the clutches of a fixed idea. Nothing could less closely approximate an actual intention to convey the infinite possibilities which Galsworthy has found in the relationship which he exploits. He enriches it with profound observation of its social and intimate significances. He is never arguing for or against—"cricket," or anything else. Galsworthy, if he has nothing else, possesses the sweet reasonableness of the judicial temperament. At times his plays, in particular, take on the complexion of the argument of opposing counsel in a trial at law; his fiction has the more seasoned, mellow aspect of the Court's summation. He is too much the tactician, even if he were not also the philosopher, to indulge in villains, completely black, for his tragic futilities. Whatever desperate thing happens to his cricketers, it is no one's fault. Or it is left to the reader to find, to answer his overwhelming questions.
To a man so saturated with the hereditary stereotype of gallantry and Spartan courage, it is inevitable that the major impulse of drama should derive out of the opposition of cricket to non-cricket. Galsworthy, however, is also fascinated by the war between the ascetic ideal and the warm rush of instinctive fulfillment of life. The first story, "A Feud," combines both themes unfolded against a background of a rural English village. The story has dimension and atmosphere. The reader is made aware, in a clarified essential development of a fully realized situation, of landmarks in the progress of the feud which are not consciously apprehended by the participants themselves. The love affair of the young heir and the dubious farm girl is handled with a deft sympathy that extracts from it all its pathos and all its irony.
Galsworthy may not carry you all the way in the story of the Cockney bookie who "Had a Horse," and was brought for the first time in his cringing life into close contact with the thoroughbred. It is unimportant whether you believe that sniveling Jimmie captured something from the horse and ever afterward had a little stiffening of the spine in him. The story is an interesting restatement of Galsworthy's obsession in another absorbing form.
"The Man Who Kept His Form" is perhaps the purest example of "cricket." The closing tableau of the leading figure—"symbol of that lost cause, gentility"—is not only a scathing indictment of the muddling by the British Government of the after-war employment problem; it is a justification of Galsworthy. Erect and uncomplaining, proud to the last, taking his reverses without bitterness, you have in this hero the consummation of playing the game.
A suggestion of Algernon Blackwood is discernible in "Timber," the story of the profiteer who sold his ancestral wood at a huge profit to the Government, and the revenge of the trees upon him for his treachery. Blackwood would have given the yarn a mystical fervor and a terrifying animation of accumulated animosity. Galsworthy has traced the psychological disintegration of his grasping gentleman with a sure touch. It is a little too suave to be horrible, and a little too remote to be tangible. Galsworthy is betrayed, as he seldom is, into losing an individual for the sake of an idea. It is as if he preferred to stew the profiteer in his own juice to giving a poignant immediacy to the downfall of a gross person, who yet has an individuality.
On the whole, this new volume deserves to stand beside the rest of Galsworthy's sensitive, questioning criticisms of the life we live.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.