The Short Stories of Galsworthy and Other Studies
[In the following excerpt, Gupta provides a thematic analysis of Galsworthy's short stories, concluding that his body of work is "truly impressive in its range and compass. "]
Galsworthy wrote a large number of short stories of various lengths, some like "A Stoic" or "Salvation of a Forsyte," almost novelettes, others mere skits like "Nightmare Child," "Strange Things," "Expectations," or "A Woman." These are an organic part of his work as a writer of fiction and "help to fill in and round out" the corners in his work. They are, like the Interludes in the Forsyte Chronicles, pendents or "cameos" serving as essential ornaments in his work.
These stories follow the same technique of brooding, introspective writing which characterises the novels. It is as though his work, representing life such as he knows it, has been cut into various lengths, and some of it has been labelled as "novels", and some as "short stories". The essential temperament behind them, the mood, the craftsmanship are the same.
Fifty-six of these stories have been assembled together in Caravan. There are still others like On Forsyte 'Change and Forsytes, Pendyces etc. to be added to these. This by itself is impressive in volume and range, but when one remembers the intensity of perception behind this work, its sheer quality of excellence and the fact that novelettes and snippets from the chronicles of Forsytes or Ferrand only fill in the crevices and serve to round off the edges in his great epic work, one cannot help wondering at his mastery as the supreme chronicler of our times.
These short stories deal with some of the most basic things in life—love, hate, beauty, ugliness, war, hunger. They present to us a vast panorama of life, representing various cross-sections of life—rich, old men who on the basis of their gilt-edged securities, their "safe six percent, dream" of beauty; variations on the theme of Old Jolyon dying as he watches beauty step across the lawn towards him, or Soames brooding over his old masters or Fleur; down and outs who have foundered and touched rock-bottom; daughters of joy, the love of lad and his lass, lonely dogs eating their hearts out; all sorts and conditions of men and women enacting the passionate, forbidding drama of life, mostly ending in death and defeat. There is a haunting sense of beauty brooding over this sad, tragic world and the refrain seems to be: how beautiful the world is, but also how cruel!
Some of the best short stories of Galsworthy are portraits of old men, sometimes old women as in "The Grey Angel." Galsworthy finds old age beautiful, mellow and wistful, a rare vintage which has only improved its quality with the passage of time. It is well-known that the inspiration behind these portraits was his father, a wonderful old man who filled Galsworthy's heart with awe, reverence and affection.
One of the finest of these stories is "A Stoic." It has been dramatised and filmed as Old English. Heythorp has a shrewd business head, functions as a strong chairman at Boards of Directors' and Shareholders' meetings. He devotes himself to pleasure and the excitement of beauty, particularly as represented in the younger generation. Ultimately, he falls a martyr to his ideal—love and beauty.
All these qualities are found in quintessence in "A Portrait," an abstract, generalised version of his father's character. He is presented at the age of eighty, possessing balance, poise, money; a well-ordered life and no edges or sharp corners. The story of his life is summed up in its movement through eighty years' span from conservative liberalism to liberal conservatism!
Other portraits of the same kind are to be found in "A Man of Devon," "A Knight" and the "Juryman." These are eccentric people, crusty and case-hardened. Galsworthy pierces the shell and tries to get behind their defences. The nearest approach to a villain in these short stories is Ventnor, the lawyer, in "A Stoic." Even he has much of the human being in him, though he behaves like a cad and a blackguard. Usually, Galsworthy analysing human character, finds much excuse for men as they are, though rarely for man's existence on earth.
Galsworthy has painted an equally large number of portraits of down-and-outs, men who have seen the yawning gulf below and stood on the edge of things. The finest of them are Gessler in "Quality"; Miles Ruding, "the man who kept his form"—an ex-gentleman, a war-veteran, reduced to taxi-driving; Caister, the jobless actor in "The Broken Boot"; the crossing sweeper in "The Choice," the eccentric in "Ultima Thule," the French barber in "Courage," and many another. In these stories we see the accusing finger pointed at society which has no use for all this talent, goodness, nobility, this overflowing human energy, and allows it to go waste. We seem to see the chasm opening at our feet, ready to swallow all and everything. In stories like "Compensation," "Conscience" or "Once More" the bottom seems to have been touched!
The two worlds are presented by Galsworthy with superb skill and mastery. In Fraternity he placed them close together, side by side and studied their contrasts. But in these stories, they exist apart, in isolation from each other, strips cut from life and presented to us without comment. He seems to put special emphasis on the rich, human quality of the material, indifferent seemingly to the source from which he draws it. Wealth or destitution, what does it matter?—he seems to say. All that matters is the rich, overflowing quality of life. And this he offers to us, with both hands, in abundance and plenty.
He glanced back at the past of these lives, prosaic and uninspring today, and discovered passionate drama, haunting undertones of romance in the background. Who could have imagined, for instance, that Swithin Forsyte concealed behind that stiff, heavy, slow-moving exterior, a story of exotic adventure, participation in revolutionary intrigues and romance, exciting and deeply moving? And yet, such was the strange experience of his youth; also that of Aunt Ann. The veil is lifted for a moment and behind the drab mask of Forsyteism we find warm, palpitating human hearts.
There are among these stories, sketches of life with hardly any movement in them. Also, there are tales of rich and thrilling adventure. Such is "A Man of Devon" which behind the quiet and somnolent beauty of the Devon country presents a tale of wild love, hate and adventure such as the Elizabethans might have applauded at the Globe Theatre. It is as though the spirit of Drake and his seadogs lives on and moves once again through Zachary.
In "The Apple Tree," "Stroke of Lightning," "The First and the Last" and other stories wild passion and drama have been unfolded. Writing of love, his most common theme, Galsworthy writes with an intensity and verve unequalled in other stories by him. Love is a wild passionflower, blooming where it will and leaving men strangely helpless under its influence. In "Stroke of Lightning" it strikes down its victims suddenly like a flash of lightning in the desert.
The objects of these amours are often girls, loose and immoral in the social sense. Galsworthy brings out the innate nobility of human nature behind all these illicit and shabby adventures. One of the finest of such portraits is in "The First and the Last," regarded by many as the best of Galsworthy's stories. In "The Apple Tree," "Solution of a Forsyte" and some other of his stories love offers itself without counting the cost or any wordly calculations. In these stories, Galsworthy's soul cast away its shell of respectability and expressed itself in the manner of the French naturalists, Flaubert, Maupassant or Dumas younger.
Along with the themes of social justice and love, another preoccupation of Galsworthy is beauty. He writes with extreme sensitiveness of the beauty of the earth and sky, particularly the countryside, of flowers and the stars, the great heart of nature breathing ail-unawares and moving human hearts, startling them out of their self-possession. He speaks of "the true Devon country-hills, hollows, hedge-banks, lanes dipping down into the earth, or going up like the sides of houses, coppices, cornfields, and little-streams wherever there's a place for one . . . the downs along the cliff, all gorse and ferns . . . " [Caravan, "The Apple Tree"]; of
the quick chatter of the little bright trout-stream, the dazzle of the butter-cup, the rocks of the old "wild men"; the calling of the cuckoos and yaffles, the hooting of the owls; and the red moon peeping out of the velvet dark at the living whiteness of the blossom .. . a sort of atmosphere as of some old walled-in English garden, with pinks, and cornflowers, and roses, and scents of lavender and lilac cool and fair, untouched, almost holy . . ."
In "Spindleberries" while this beauty of earth is described with a sense of wonder, almost breathless, it is suggested that it is a blasphemy to dream of ever being able to depict it through colour and brush. All that one can do is to stand in reverence and admire it. One can never capture it through pen or paint.
Beauty, by starlight and sunlight and moonlight, in the fields and woods, on the hill-tops, and by riverside . . . Flowers, and the flight of birds, and the ripple of the wind, and all the shifting play of light and colour which made a man despair when he wanted to use them.
A number of these stories were written under the shadow of the First World-War. They have an ache behind them, a dislike of all forms of cheap, tawdry Jingoism. He writes about the victims of mass-hysteria worked up by the press, pacifists, German war-internees, their families. The pack is on the trail and the victims at bay. Galsworthy returns to his pet theme that the individual left to himself is harmless enough; it is only when he gets together in a pack that he becomes dangerous. This is the theme of a small skit, "The Pack," which reminds one of his full-length play on the same subject, The Mob. He opens this story with the following words:
"It's only," said H., "when men run in packs that they lose their sense of decency. At least that's my experience. Individual man—I'm not speaking of savages—is more given to generosity than meanness, rarely brutal, inclines in fact to be a gentleman. It's when you add three or four more to him that his sense of decency, his sense of personal responsibility, his private standards, go by the board ... "
These short stories of Galsworthy cover a wide range in technique and quality. He specializes in portraits, stories of slow, imperceptible movement of life, almost studies of still-life, like "Spindleberries," but there are also stories of wild passion and drama, like "The Man of Devon" or "The First and the Last" There are stories with only character in them, as "A Portrait," or only incident or atmosphere in them as "The Black Godmother" or "Spindleberries." There are also stories perfectly rounded in form, with plot, character and setting, an onward rush and movement in them. They are, like "The Apple Tree" or "The First and the Last," some of his best work.
Galsworthy's peculiar gift as a writer is to convey a vivid impression of life in its gentle, onward flow like that of a river in open, flat country. His technique may best be studied in a story like "A Stoic," where the thoughts and movements of Heythorp have been captured and reproduced in all their life-like quality. Heythorp attends a meeting with the Board of Directors, walks home, bathes, broods, dines, sleeps, ultimately triumphing over his debtors and killing himself deliberately with drink, balking them of victory, setting at naught the instructions of his doctor. Heythorp's whole life is passed in review, as he sits brooding in a chair:
Alone again, he had browsed, developing the idea which had come to him.
Though, to dwell in the heart of shipping, Sylvanus Heythorp had lived at Liverpool twenty years, he was from the Eastern Countries, of a family so old that it professed to despise the Conquest. Each of its generations occupied nearly twice as long as those of less tenacious men . . . Born in the early twenties of the nineteenth century, Sylvanus Heythorp, after an education broken by escapades both at school and college, had fetched up in that simple London of the late forties, where claret, opera, and eight per cent for your money ruled a cheery roost. Made partner in his shipping firm well before he was thirty, he had sailed with a wet sheet and a flowing tide; dancers, claret, clicquot, and picket, a cab with a tiger; some travel—all that delicious early-Victorian consciousness of nothing save a golden time. It was all so full and mellow that he was forty before he had his only love affair of any depth. . . .
[Caravan, "A Stoic"]
Thus stroke by stroke, the portrait grows, with infinite deft touches. The whole procession of life passes through the consciousness and is transferred to the paper with care and skill, reminicent of a landscape or portrait painter. The sharp, crisp strokes, small, infinite almost in number—and impression is piled on impression. Finally, the picture emerges, complete, life-like, moving in its deep human content and quality.
There are other occasions, when the torrent rushes forth as in a flood, with no dykes to contain it. The whole story of English society, Victorian, post-Victorian, waryears and post-War is thus presented as a grand old pageant before us. A hundred characters, carved out from all sections of society, pass before us and haunt the memory for ever afterwards. It is an elaborate canvas which is ultimately put before us after including all these brief, intimate studies. The effect of the whole is truly impressive in its range and compass.
Discussing the art of the short story in the Foreword to Caravan Galsworthy writes:
If the writer of the short tale submit himself to the discipline demanded by the crisp and clear expression of his genuine fancies and his genuine moods, he has submitted to quite enough.
As the untaught spider spins his delicate rose-window and assures it against wind and rain by sheer adjustment—not a thread too many or too few—so let us writers of short tales try to spin out of our own instinct and vision the round and threaded marvel. If in it we catch some hopeful editor and hold him to ransom—all the better for us; but if we don't we have none the less fulfilled our being, and that is our real end in life.
The writing of Galsworthy is a marvel of delicate adjustments, economy and restraint in expression—a model of crisp and clear expression, "not a thread too many or too few". It is no less certain that through these stories, he has "fulfilled his being" and served his "real end in life," because he has successfully held in his joined hands the flowing waters of life and offered them to the reader for a brief, fleeting moment which, however, remains with him a warm, palpitating memory for ever.
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