John Galsworthy

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The Short-Story Writer

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SOURCE: "The Short-Story Writer," in John Galsworthy, Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 87-100.

[Sternlicht is an American educator, critic, and poet. In the following excerpt, he traces the development in Galsworthy's short fiction from the earlier influence of French naturalism to a greater use of symbolism and references to classical mythology. ]

John Galsworthy considered the long short story to be "one of the best of all forms of fiction; it is the magic vehicle for atmospheric drama. In this form the writer . . . comes nearest to the poet, the painter, the musician. The tale rises, swells and closes, like some movement of a symphony" [Leon Schalit, John Galsworthy: A Survey, 1929]. The shorter story was a quick-flashing effort "over almost before form is thought of." Galsworthy wrote long short stories, short stories, and sketches, fairly brief descriptions of individuals representing a type or class of people, or personifying an idea, an ideal, or a value. The sketches are carryovers from Victorian literature, with a long ancestry back to the Renaissance writers and even to the ancient Romans and Greeks, but little seen by the time Galsworthy was writing his.

The main preoccupations of Galsworthy's short fiction are love, beauty, the glory of nature, social justice, hatred, old age, the poor, and care for animals. Few of his stories present high adventure. More are either mood pieces or stories of passions in conflict. As his storytelling art developed, he moved away from the French naturalism in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century and wrote stories incorporating careful use of symbols and classical myths.

Galsworthy published fourteen volumes of stories and sketches, two of which, Two Forsyte Interludes (1927) and On Forsyte 'Change (1930), are part of the chronicles. The fifteenth volume of stories, selected by Ada Galsworthy and titled Forsytes, Pendyces, and Others, was published posthumously in 1935. Some of Galsworthy's stories, like "The Apple Tree," are among his most famous works, regularly anthologized and often a part of the curriculum in English-speaking schools the world over.

Galsworthy began as a short-story writer. From the Four Winds (1897) brought him some forty reviews, mostly favorable, and convinced him that he could indeed be a writer. Yet, in his 1932 Nobel Prize address, near the end of his life, he would call this collection of nine stories, imitative of Rudyard Kipling and Bret Harte, "that dreadful little book" [R. H. Mottram, For Some We Loved, 1956]. Galsworthy never revised that first collection or allowed it to be republished. In fact, twenty-five years after it was published he bought up the few remaining unsold copies to keep them out of circulation. Still, it was with the short story that he chose to begin his apprenticeship in writing. Galsworthy's major story and sketch collections are A Man of Devon (1901), A Commentary (1908), A Motley (1910), The Little Man (1915), Five Tales (1918), Tatterdemalion (1920), and Captures (1923). Abracadabra (1924) is a reprint of the last five stories in The Little Man. Caravan: The Assembled Tales (1925) is an anthology containing all of Galsworthy's notable long short stories, with the date of writing affixed to each piece, thus providing the best single volume opportunity to understand the development, scope, and achievement of the author as a writer of short fiction. Satires (1927) does much the same thing for Galsworthy's short short fiction and sketches, essentially reprinting A Commentary and the "Studies of Extravagance" section of The Little Man.

A MAN OF DEVON (1901)

Galsworthy's fourth book, the last written under a pseudonym, is, like his first, a collection of stories. A Man of Devon contains four long pieces: "A Man of Devon," "The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte," "The Silence," and "A Knight." The title piece, set in the author's ancestrial home shire, is an adventure tale of wild love and hate in a lovely countryside. A beautiful farmer's daughter is distracted from her young swain by a gun-running, buccaneering sailor. Finally, she is so upset that she jumps to her death from a cliff. Galsworthy uses the time-honored, if very old-fashioned, epistolary form, which harkens back to Samuel Richardson. The letters are written by a visitor who happens to witness the events. The story is extremely hard to read because of Galsworthy's strained and unsuccessful attempt to write dialect. Moreover, the work is so imitative of Thomas Hardy that it accidentally approaches parody.

By far the best and only memorable story in A Man of Devon is "The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte," the first story in what would eventually be "The Forsyte Chronicles." The story is the initial indication of great talent in Galsworthy. In it, Old Swithin Forsyte, a rich man, company director, and a bachelor, is dying alone. He dreams of an adventure he had as a young man, fifty years before, in which while traveling in Europe he met and fell in love with a young working-class girl. Tempted to marry her, he finally realized that it would not do. She would never be acceptable to his family and class, and so, by giving her up he "saved" himself at the last moment. The story, rich in irony, portrays one of Galsworthy's fine old men who "die without seeing sacrifices, chivalry, love, fidelity, beauty, and strange adventure." In other words, Swithin dies without having lived. Rich living is no substitute for an engaged life. The unloved leave life like bubbles breaking in the air. Galsworthy is almost cruel in his depiction of the epicurean bachelor's death. Swithin dies drinking champagne: "'It isn't Heidseck!' he though angrily. . . . 'But as he bent to drink again something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin Forsyte died over the bubbles." And in the end the reader feels both pity and scorn for the old man.

"The Silence" is the Joseph Conrad-like story of a mining engineer's suicide overseas, worn down by a job that forces him to send men to their deaths in deep, unsafe shafts; by the terrible silence of the jungle around him; and by the implacable incomprehension of his masters at company headquarters in London. Once more, an observer, also an engineer, sees, learns, and reveals how far men may be driven even against their nature by those who have power. In the end, after learning of suffering and death, the owners merely remark: "Business is Business! Isn't it?"

Set in Monte Carlo, "A Knight" is the romantic story of an old soldier of fortune who, like the hero of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896), enjoys recounting his past battles and adventures to the narrator. Many years ago, at forty-five, he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl, married her, and lost her to a young man. She died leaving a child that is not his but whom the old soldier struggles to support. He is a man, nevertheless, who deeply respects women, and when a woman's reputation is traduced in his presence, he provokes a duel, which he then uses to end his life of heart-broken misery. In this piece, Galsworthy shows his admiration for those men who gallantly act to protect and serve the opposite sex regardless of the cost to themselves.

In A Man of Devon, Galsworthy struggled to find a personal voice as a short-story writer. In three of the four stories he used someone else's. In "The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte" he found his own.

A COMMENTARY (1908)

A Commentary is a book of twenty short, satirical sketches in which Galsworthy presents contemporary problems and the realities of life in an industrial society to an audience of readers not much given to thinking about the poor, the unemployed, the aged, and the powerless. Galsworthy indicts the economic system of Edwardian England, and asks, "What will we do about it?"

A crippled old man whose job is to warn the public of the danger of a steam roller points out the evils of society as an introduction to the commentary provided in the sketches. "A Lost Dog" shows how an unemployed man can come to think of himself as an animal. "Demos" portrays a brutal man who cannot accept that his wife has left him for good reasons: "I'm 'er 'usband, an I mean to 'ave er, alive or dead."

In "Old Age," a seventy-one-year-old painter, out of work, with no food or blankets, and his equally old wife refuse to go into a workhouse for the poor. "The Careful Man" satirizes a politician afraid that social change will take place too quickly. "Facts" satirizes the literal-minded. "Fear" depicts the terror of an unemployed and dying consumptive who is no longer able to support his family. In "Fashion," Galsworthy attacks insensitive rich women, as he would do in the novel Fraternity. Fashion is allegorized as an elegant lady: "You pass, glittering . . . and the eyes of the hollow-chested work girls on the pavement fix on you a thousand eager looks. . . . They do not know that you are as dead as snow around a crater."

"Sport" depicts the harassment of a prostitute. "Money" points out the idolatrous worship of wealth. "Progress" shows that modern inventions do not serve the progress of humanity. Other pieces show the barriers middle-class society erects to protect itself from those aspiring to rise out of poverty. In "Justice" the author argues, as he does on the stage, that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. "Mother" and "Child" depict the effect of poverty on the helpless. But at the end, "Hope" somewhat sentimentally indicates that optimism can survive even in an old cripple, if courage endures.

As always, Galsworthy's heart is in the right place. However well-meaning, the viewpoint is still that of a rich reformer venturing from his club to observe and deplore. The sketches are frank, uncomplicated, and only a little self-conscious, but they lack individuality. That is their fatal weakness. One at a time they have some impact. All together they cancel each other out.

A MOTLEY (1910)

A Motley is a collection of twenty-eight stories, studies, and impressions written between 1899 and 1910, many of which first appeared in such periodicals as the English Review, Nation, Englishwoman, and Westminster Gazette. The book opens with a sketch that is obviously a portrait of, and a homage to, the author's solicitor father at age eighty. "A Portrait" had not been previously published. Galsworthy saved it for a place of honor in this collection. His painting of his deceased father is most tender and loving. The author also seems to be intending to show the source of his own convictions and carings, for the unnamed old gentleman believed that "money was .. . the symbol of a well-spent, well-ordered life." He had "never been a sportsman—not being in the way of hunting . . . preferring to spend such time as he might have had for shooting, in communing with his beloved mountains." His "love of beauty was a sensuous, warm glow, secretly separating him from the majority of his associates." The old man believed in equality, saw charity as a personal obligation, and loved cricket. Furthermore, he did not like the profession of law. Galsworthy was reminding himself that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

"A Fisher of Men" is a short story, a portrait, and a study all in one. In this piece Galsworthy depicts a country parson who feels that his congregation does not give him his due. His flock constantly diminished during his twenty years of pastoring, for he was small-minded: "His face had been set, too, against irreverence; no one . . . might come to his church in flannel trousers"; and he was stiff-necked and without compassion, always pointing out that "the fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake which burneth fire and brimstone." He has no love or gentleness for his parishioners. Vexed near to madness by their rejection, he prays himself to death in a fierce rain by the seashore and they bury him beneath a paradoxically admonishing and forgiving inscription: "God is love." As usual, Galsworthy is hard on the established church and its purveyors of religion. Their intolerance of human drives and needs is not only counterproductive, it is a repressive source of human unhappiness. "A Fisher of Men" is one of Galsworthy's finest stories to the time he penned it, 1908. The parson is a tragic, Captain Ahab-like figure. The author's treatment of him is a skillful mix of invective, satire, and sharp characterization.

"The Prisoner" is a story full of compassion and pathos, in which Galsworthy shows the dehumanizing effect of long imprisonment. He argues that no crime committed by a human is equal to the crime done to that person by the state when it incarcerates him or her for tens of years or even life. Galsworthy's horror of imprisonment in small cells seems almost claustrophobic.

In "A Parting," the persona observes and comments on the farewell of a pair of lovers. It contrasts with the lightly ironic depiction of two lovers having their first secret meeting presented earlier in A Motley as "The Meeting." "The Japanese Quince" is a charming vignette in which a flowering exotic tree attracts two very conservative business men, who although next-door neighbors, have never spoken to each other. The tree brings them together, but alas, their inbred reticence prevents friendship for these mirror-image men, and they return to relating to life through their newspapers.

"The Consummation," a rare, lighter moment in Galsworthy's stories, is an amusing piece for any reader familiar with Galsworthy's life. An amiable man named Harrison is told at a railway station by a lady in whom he is interested: "Why don't you write? You are just the person!" This, of course, is what Ada had said to Galsworthy to get him started on a career. Harrison writes a collection of short stories that he can only get published by subsidizing it. It receives good reviews, however, and he is compared to Poe, de Maupassant, and Kipling. Harrison decides to write a novel, and a friend who is "a man of genius" undertakes to "help" him. As a result, the novel is less well received by the public but is admired by the "man of genius." Then a well-known critic decides to help him make "art" out of his work. Each new book is less well received by the public and more difficult to read, but to the critical eye his work is advancing. Finally, Harrison writes a novel that is truly great: "'I have done it at last. It is good, wonderfully good!' . . . He had indeed exhausted his public. It was too good—he could not read it himself! Returning to his cortage he placed the manuscript in the drawer. He never wrote another word." The man of genius is Joseph Conrad and the critic is Edward Garnett, and Galsworthy is getting even, good-naturedly, for the early somewhat insincere patronizing by the former and the school-mastering of the latter, both trying to make Galsworthy a "serious" writer. In truth Galsworthy was always content in being a middle-brow writer for a middle-brow audience.

"Once More" is a powerful and moving story of a young flower girl, resembling Mrs. Megan in the play The Pigeon, who, desrted by her young husband, attempts prostitution to support her child. In the end he returns, starving and frozen, and she takes him back into her arms to nurture him.

A Motley shows growth in narrative skills. Galsworthy was learning how to trim back the elaborate plots of A Man of Devon and expand on the acute economical character insights of A Commentary. Combining simple and believable plots with sharp observation and a less self-conscious prose style would result in the master storytelling evidenced in the later collections.

The Little Man (1915)

The Little Man contains a short play with the same title; a second entitled Hall-Marked; ten satiric sketches of such contemporary types as "The Writer," "The Critic," "The Plain Man," "The Artist," "The Housewife," and "The Competitor," generally shown as selfish, egotistical, competitive, and argumentative; and nine short stories of which "The Voice of—," "A Simple Tale," and "Ultima Thule" are the best known and most memorable.

"The Voice of—" takes place in a music hall where the program has become rather sordid, featuring a woman dancing indecorously. A voice is heard condemning the performance, and a strange light is seen on stage. The audience departs in terror and the theater staff are perplexed. The implication is that the voice of God has cried out against the profanation of female beauty.

"A Simple Tale" uses Ferrand again to comment on how the poor are neglected. In it a demented old man who thinks he is the Wandering Jew of ancient legend becomes more Christ-like as he endures suffering and neglect. Indirectly, it is also an attack on anti-Semitism.

The last piece in The Little Man, "Ultima Thule," is a touching story of an old musician who feeds stray cats and mends injured birds instead of feeding himself. He dies and his beloved bullfinch falls dead on his heart. The old man is a St. Francis of Assisi, and the story is one of Galsworthy's many tributes to humans who love and save animals. In death "his face, as white now, almost as his silvery head, had in the sunlight a radiance like that of a small, bright angel gone to sleep."

The Little Man is not a major part of Galsworthy's short fiction. In one or two stories, however, it foreshadows the achievements of Five Tales and Captures.

Five Tales (1918)

In Five Tales Galsworthy reaches the height of his ability as a writer of short stories. Two of these tales, "A Stoic" and "The Apple Tree," are his most anthologized stories. "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" not only serves as a bridge between The Man of Property and the rest of the Saga, it is the single most lyric moment in the entire chronicles. Although "The First and the Last" was begun just before the war, the five stories were a product of the First World War, but only the shortest, "The Juryman," deals with the conflict. Galsworthy used the writing of these long stories as a method of escaping from dismal reality into the happier world of the imagination, and in the case of "The Apple Tree," particularly, the world of love, beauty, and interpersonal passion.

"The First and the Last" is a melodramatic tale of passion, murder, and suicide, in which an eminent but ruthless attorney tries to conceal the crime of his weak but kindly younger brother. The latter has killed a brute who was forcing his attentions on the devoted young prostitute with whom the young man is having an affair. The older brother is motivated to help, not out of love, but out of a desire to protect his own reputation. Thus, when an innocent tramp is accused and sentenced to death, the attorney is delighted, and plans to send the lovers to Argentina. But the younger brother has too much integrity and compassion to allow someone else to die for his crime. The lovers choose suicide, leaving an exonerating note. But when the attorney finds the bodies, he destroys the note to save himself, even though it means an innocent man will die. Thus, the powerful older brother, first in the world, becomes last in the eyes of God, while the poor, lowly lovers have become first.

The story's ending is tragically ironic. The lovers' sacrifice has been for naught. In this world at least, the hard ones, without principles, triumph. Galsworthy turned this story into an effective one-act play. In both story and play he is especially skillful in delineating the character of Wanda, the Polish-born prostitute. She is a touching figure of female helplessness, a young woman who, despite being the victim of male exploitation and domination, maintains her great innate capacity for love, devotion, and abnegation.

"A Stoic" takes place in Liverpool in 1905. As with "The First and the Last" and also "The Apple Tree," Galsworthy turned the story into a play, in this case a three-act comedy called Old English. Again Galsworthy draws a vivid and memorable old man, Sylvanus Heythorp, an unscrupulous company director who lives life to the full. He is the father of an illegitimate son by a mistress who has died, and he has also fathered two legitimate children by an unloved wife, also deceased. For some years he has been a widower doting on the family of his illegitimate son, whom he loved most of all but who died young and impoverished.

Old Heythorp goes deeply into debt to support his lifestyle, and in order to obtain cash, he carries out an unlicensed transaction for a large commission. Trapped by a hating creditor trying to disgrace him just before death, the eighty-year-old Heythorp shows his disdain for his enemies and society by ending his life with a glorious dinner deliciously described by Galsworthy. He literally eats, drinks, and smokes himself into a happy sleep from which he does not awake. The author and the reader identify with the old bon vivant and his joie de vivre. He successfully defied society's conventions and got away with it.

"The Apple Tree" is the perennially favorite story of Galsworthy fans. Based on an old Dartmoor legend of a girl crossed in love who takes her own life, it is his most finely crafted, most symbolic, and most poetic tale [Catherine Dupré, John Galsworthy, 1976]. The title is from a line of Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides' play Hippolytus: "The apple tree, the singing and the gold," a line Galsworthy uses to open and close the story.

The simple plot centers on the return of Frank Ashurst, a middle-aged man, to the place on the moorlands of Devonshire where, twenty-six years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old student, he met, made love to, proposed to, and abandoned a beautiful, seventeen-year-old Welsh farm girl named Megan. After recalling the memory, he learns that she drowned herself after he deserted her. Ashurst, his life turned to ashes by the revelation, believes that he has been punished by love for his traitorous ways: "The Cyprian,' goddess of love [had] taken her revenge! And before his eyes, dim with tears, came Megan's face with the sprig of apple blossoms in her dark wet hair."

Galsworthy symbolically evokes memories of both the Garden of Eden, with its apple of temptation, and the Garden of the Hesperides, with its golden apples, the prizes for great efforts. Frank finds Megan beneath an apple tree in a garden. She is both an Aphrodite and an Eve. He rejects the goddess of love by mistaking her for the temptress, and by marrying Stella, a figure like the Artemis of Hippolytus and Diana, the goddess of chastity and the night. In doing so, and because he is prideful and unable to embrace the primordial patterns of life, Frank loses the garden for both of them. Megan dies, and he lives a sterile and conventional life. All that remains for him is the memory that once "he was not quite sane, thinking of that morning's kiss, and of tonight under the apple tree [where] fauns and dryads surely lived."

"The Juryman" is the story of Henry Bosengate, a successful businessman, who during the First World War is called upon to serve on a jury hearing the case of an army private who was so miserable away from his wife that he tried to kill himself. He is charged with attempting suicide and thus trying to deprive the king of a soldier. Bosengate finds his sympathy growing for the accused, and he argues successfully on his behalf with the other jurors. Returning home after the trial, he realizes how much he loves and needs his wife, Kate, whom he has taken for granted. He thinks:

"We haven't been close—really close, you and I, so that we each understand what the other is feeling. It's all in that, you know; understanding—sympathy—it's priceless. When I saw that poor devil . . . sent back to his regiment to begin his sorrows all over again—wanting his wife, thinking and thinking of her just as you know I'd be thinking and wanting you, I thought what an awful outside sort of life we lead, never telling each other what we really think and feel, never being really close."

The sensitive tale proposes that there is a store of warmth and compassion in most people. One can learn from the misfortune and suffering of another that the time to cherish those one loves is now.

The beautiful "Indian Summer of a Forsyte," .. . is the last story in Five Tales. These long pieces, especially "The Apple Tree," "A Stoic" and "Indian Summer of a Forsyte," show Galsworthy's mastery of the genre. His short fiction could create that kind of resonance in a reader that causes him or her to go back to the piece again and again to find new meaning, as well as remembered beauty.

Tatterdemalion (1920)

The last of Galsworthy's war stories and the first of his stories written in the peace that followed appeared in Tatterdemalion, a "ragamuffin" of a collection. The book contains fifteen pieces in "Part I. Of War-time" and eight in "Part II. Of Peace-time." All are shorter than the stories in Five Tales, and they are not memorable, representing Galsworthy's lesser fictional efforts of the 1914-19 period. The stories are generally about the fate of the noncombatants on the home front in the war, the unsung sacrifice of some, and the unnecessary suffering of others at the hands of jingoists.

The first story, "The Grey Angel," is probably a companion piece to "Portrait" in A Motley, in that it seems to be a fictionalized and idealized sketch of his mother, who died in 1915. In it a valiant eighty-year-old English lady gives her all doing Red Cross work in France during the war. She thinks of everyone but herself, and although most of the gifts she brings the wounded French soldiers are useless to them, they appreciate the spirit of heartfelt giving. As she dies, she shows her inner peace, her indifference to death, and her concern for her children: "'My darlings—don't cry; smile!'"

"Defeat" tells of a German prostitute trapped in London during the war and, in order to survive, forced to service the very soldiers who are killing her countrymen in battle. Her life is, to Galsworthy, as terrible as any combatant's. In fact, the wounded young officer she picks up enjoys trench warfare: "It was great. We did laugh that morning. They got me much too soon, though—a swindle!" He had been cut down in a charge by four machine-gun bullets. Galsworthy was naive and out of touch in implying, as late as 1916, the date of the writing of the story, that most English soldiers were exhilarated by battle. The poor girl suffers terribly as she hears of an English victory and then tears up the money the soldier gave her. Alone, lying on the floor, she sings "Die Wacht am Rhein"

"Flotsam and Jetsam," "Cafard," and "Bidan" are stories about wounded French soldiers and stem from Galsworthy's hospital experience. "The Recruit" is about an undersized Dartmoor agricultural worker of little intelligence who tries to enlist but is rejected. He is deeply hurt, but of course, he survives the war while the brighter and stronger die by the millions. "The Peace Meeting" tells of an attempt to end the war that is frustrated by the very men it could save. In "Heaven and Earth" an old man sadly buries his dog, ironically noting that he could be sad for an animal's death and impervious to the war slaughter. In "The Muffled Ship" Canadian soldiers return home. "Heritage" tells of the service to crippled children and those who were air-raid victims. "The Mother Stone" implies that the First World War occurred because of the greed and power-seeking of colonial exploiters. "The Bright Side" and "The Dog It Was That Died" attack the British treatment of resident Germans, like Galsworthy's brother-in-law, during the war years, while "Recorded" is a soldier's sad farewell to his wife and babes. "A Green Hill Far Away" is a thanksgiving for peace.

"Part II. Of Peace-time" begins with an excellent tale, "Spindleberries," one of Galsworthy's finest short stories. It tells of two painters, cousins: a woman who gives up everything for beauty, and a man who is commercially successful and who is both disdainful and jealous of his relative. "Life! Alica! She had made a pretty mess of it, and yet who knew what secret raptures she had felt with her subtle lover, beauty, by starlight and sunlight and moonlight, in the fields and woods, on the hilltops, and by riverside! . . . Who could say that she had missed the prize of life?"

"Expectations" is a somewhat humorous story of a married couple inept in everything except keeping their relationship going. "Manna" is a biting tale of the travails of a stubborn clergyman, reminiscent of Reverend Pierson in Saint's Progress. "Two Looks" tells of the painful love of two women for the same dying old man. "Fairyland" is a very short but lovely countryside sketch. "A Strange Thing," "The Nightmare Child," and "Buttercup-night" are village tales set in a place like Manaton on Dartmoor.

Tatterdemalion is a minor work. As much as anything it is a workbook for themes, ideas, and scenes in the novels and plays written during the same period. Captures comes much closer to the great skill in writing short fiction Galsworthy showed in Five Tales.

Captures (1923)

Captures contains sixteen short stories. The first, longest, and strongest is "A Feud." Another Dartmoor piece like "The Apple Tree," it is a village tragedy in which two men quarrel over the shooting of a dog, engage in a disastrous law suit, and cause the death of one litigant's son, who runs off to the war. In the end, the young man's contentious father, while trying to kill his enemy, hears the church bell tolling for his son's death, and "in Bowden something went out. He had not the heart to hate." It has taken the death of a loved one to bring peace to two troubled families. In "A Feud," Galsworthy again shows that he can write with success about rural, agricultural people. Of course in his home at Manaton he had direct daily contact with them. Galsworthy had less success depicting the proletariat and urban poor, for although he had great sympathy for them, he had almost no contact with them.

In "Timber," a baronet decides to sell his ancestral works to the government during the war to make great profit and appear patriotic at the same time. Walking in the woods in winter, he loses his way and freezes to death. The woods take revenge before their own demise. "Santa Lucia," "Blackmail," "A Hedonist," "Stroke of Lightning," and "A Long-ago Affair" are effective stories of sexual passion, longing, and jealousy concerning middle-aged spouses and lovers. "The Broken Boot" and "The Man Who Kept His Form" are sad pieces about men who struggle to live up to a code of honor and a way of life. In the former it is an impoverished actor and in the latter a gentleman, the dying "symbol of that lost cause, gentility."

"Philanthropy" and "Acme" are stories of writers who are surprised by the unexpected ways of their fellow humans. "Salta pro Nobis (A Variation)" is a version of the Mata Hari story: a dancer spy performs for the last time before being shot. "Late—299," like the play Justice, shows the devastating result of imprisonment. A doctor serves two years for performing an abortion on a woman to save her honor. Afterward, with anger and cynicism, he defies the world: "I am so human that I'll see the world damned before I'll take its pity. . . . Leave me alone. I am content." "Conscience" and "Virtue" show young men who act according to their conscience regardless of personal cost.

"Had a Horse," the last and second longest story in Captures tells of a nonentity of a bookmaker who obtains a racehorse as payment on a debt and for the first time actually sees such an animal. He comes to love the beauty of his beast, and his regard for his animal gives him pride and self-respect that lasts "for years betting on horses he never saw, underground like a rat, yet never again so accessible to the kicks of fortune, or so prone before the shafts of superiority." In this story Galsworthy enjoys showing his intimate and precise knowledge of the sport of kings.

In Captures Galsworthy once more approaches the level of excellence in short fiction first achieved in Five Tales. Galsworthy's post-World War I outlook, however, was different from that he espoused during fierce wartime. His fiction mellowed, grew more nostalgic, and showed a growing tolerance for human frailty.

From A Man of Devon through Captures, Galsworthy's short fiction paralleled his novels in subject and style. His ability as a novelist peaked first, before the First World War, with the social satires like A Man of Property and The Country House. The high-water mark of his short fiction came later, during the war, with Five Tales. When he continued the chronicles after the war, his interest in the short story declined.

Although produced by a master stylist, a skilled satirist, and a careful craftsman, Galsworthy's short fiction has several imperfections. For one, the author is often a blatant sentimentalist, particularly when it comes to portraying women or the poor. His women are almost always self-sacrificing sufferers like Wanda, the Polish prostitute in "The First and the Last," May, the German prostitute in "Defeat," or Megan in "The Apple Tree." They are invariably courageous in their travail, like Mrs. Holsteig in "The Dog It Was That Died," the Scotswoman whose German-born husband and English-born son are interned in the war. When old, like the "Grey Angel" they are noble. Galsworthy's chivalric code seems to have made him incapable of villainizing a woman or granting her major human imperfections, at least within the confines of short fiction.

Also, Galsworthy's working-class men, like Tom in "The Recruit" and the private in "The Juryman," are almost always humble hat-in-handers. They are primitively eloquent, but ultimately unconvincing in dialogue or dialect.

Other characters bathe in self-pity. Sometimes, particularly in the fine depiction of old men like Heythorp in "A Stoic," there is "at times the breath of decadence" [Joseph J. Reilly, "John Galsworthy and His Short Stories," The Catholic World 123, 1926]. These men fear death less because of a natural terror of oblivion or concern for an afterlife, than because their already dulling senses will be forever extinguished.

Finally, Galsworthy's stories are unrelentingly serious. Humor is almost totally absent. An occasional lighter touch would have offered a contrast that could have exculpated the author from the charges of bleakness and unremitting pessimism.

Still, on balance, few of Galsworthy's contemporaries spoke out in short fiction against the injustice of life as successfully as he did. Nor did they match his broad vision of an often hypocritical society in transition from the seemingly stable Victorian era to the war-weary, cynical, anarchistic, and sexually emancipated world of the 1920s.

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I'm Not Such a Fool as I Seem

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