John Galsworthy

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Mr. Galsworthy's Tales

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SOURCE: "Mr. Galsworthy's Tales," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 864, August 8, 1918, p. 371.

[Below, the critic lauds Five Tales.]

Mr. Galsworthy's work, on a small scale or a big, has the quality of greatness. It is largely planned and stately built. There is dignity in its substance and in its form. It is not showy; it is not brilliant; it is not even clever. It is as free from that cocksureness which is the attitude of much modern writing as it is from the tip-and-run sensation which his younger contemporaries mistake for feeling, and from the "carrying-on" which it was a fault of his predecessors to mistake for sensitiveness. You may dig deep into what he gives you, and the deeper you dig the richer you find the store to be. And his prose reveals his nature. It never shows off. It moves with dignity, but so quietly that at times you are tempted to declare it sluggish or even commonplace, until, when the tale is finished, you realize how apt an expression it has given to the quality of the mind that made it. The secret of this greatness may be partly shyness. It has taken Mr. Galsworthy some time to reveal himself. For years he seemed to be afraid of his own convictions and his own feelings. Little by little he has burned through the obstruction; but he is still rather shy, and the shyness saves him from exaggeration and display. But behind it lies a bigger and nobler quality—the habit of reverence. He reverences life, and nature, and men. He brushes nothing aside; he "turns" nothing impatiently "down." A mind that has this quality goes on developing and enriching itself. It may do its finest work when the man is an old man.

That Mr. Galsworthy is still shy is proved by his abiding preference for the ironic method. "Life calls the tune—we dance," he reminds us on his title-page. Life called such a tune to Keith Darrant, that eminent and respectable barrister, ["The First and the Last"], that he found himself accessory after the fact to a murder, and the cause that an innocent man was hanged. We know that this is not what he wants to tell us. The point behind this woeful exhibition of respectability tricked and tortured is the contrasted happiness of Keith Darrant's brother, the murderer, the drunkard, who loved a woman of the streets and died happy in her dying arms. Life called such a tune to Frank Ashurst [in "The Apple Tree"], that he left a passionate farm-girl to kill herself for love of him, while he ran away and hid in marriage with a dull young lady who embodied for him just then respectability and good form and whatever is seemly and safe. Again, the point behind the tale is the beauty of that moonlit, apple-blossom idyll in a Devon farm; and very beautifully it is told. But still, Mr. Galsworthy is shy of telling it for its own sake. We do not mean that he loads the dice against love, but the bent of his mind is such that he shrinks from showing love triumphant. He must, as it were, apologize for it by holding it against the "real" world of convention and class and property. He is still a little afraid of his own tenderness, his own passion for beauty and good will. He must show us by his irony what we should like to find him showing for once in its naked beauty, unashamed.

In two of these tales he "lets himself go," nerved by his admiration of power, and adopts the direct, not the ironic, method. They are both tales of old men—old men very unlike each other, though in youth they were friends. One is Sylvanus Heythorp, paralysed, lonely, beset by creditors, but still fighting, in a mawkish world that he despises, for his independence, his dinner, and his own way [in "A Stoic"]. A noble old fellow this, for all his materialism; a noble old bear, harried by curs, and defiantly dying just before they can pull him down. The other is our old friend (for a friend he has seemed ever since The Man of Property) Jolyon Forsyte, now in his "Indian summer." No one who cares for craftsmanship in letters can fail to enjoy the difference between Mr. Galsworthy's method of rapping out the rough tune of old Heythorp and his method of lingering over, "pressing out" the sweetness of Uncle Jolyon's last days, sunset-lit with his love of beauty, especially as it calls to him in the eyes and hair and movement of tragic Irene Heron. "What is it makes us love, and makes us die? I must go to bed." We know, or thought we knew, this masterful old fellow, this Forsyte; but to meet him here with his little granddaughter, his dog, and Irene is to hear a strange music of love and death. Mr. Galsworthy is not here shy of his subject.

The most subtle and te most subtly balanced of all these five tales is that called "The Juryman." It seems obvious enough, this contrast (very characteristic of Mr. Galsworthy) between the wretched little Welsh conscript, who had tried to kill himself because he could not longer bear separation from his wife, and the sleek, prosperous, uxorious stockbroker who is one of the jurymen at his trial. A few years ago, we fancy, Mr. Galsworthy would have stopped short at the contrast. He can go beyond it now to the mystery of life. His irony plays about Mr. Bosengate's self-satisfaction; but before we have done with Mr. Bosengate he too is caught in the mystery.

Curious thing—life! Curious world! Curious forces in it—making one do the opposite of what one wished; always—always making one do the opposite, it seemed! The furtive light from that creeping moon was getting hold of things down there, stealing in among the boughs of the trees. "There's something ironical," he thought, "which walks about. Things don't come off as you think they will. I meant, I tried—but one doesn't change like that all of a sudden, it seems. Fact is life's too big a thing for one!"

The story is short, but it is also great; and it speaks even more clearly than the other four of a mind in which sternness is matched with tenderness, imagination with sound sense; a mind which dreams out upon the vision without being blind to the fact.

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