JOHN GALSWORTHY

Evening Star, Issue 21706, 28 April 1934, Page 21

JOHN GALSWORTHY

A PERSONAL IMPRESSION Publication of a new life of John Galsworthy has led Mr St. John Ervine, in the ‘ Observer,’ to set down his own impressions. John Galsworthy was exceptionally sensitive, as a single glance at his hand; some face ought to have told even the least expert person in psychology. His work is a long protest against cruelty and persecution, intolerance and pain. Mr Shaw’s preface to ‘ On the Rocks ’ would have provoked him to the most passionate resentment, nor would that resentment have been robbed of its passion by the deliberate, almost icy, manner in which he would probably have expressed it. Galsworthy continually kept hold of himself. He had to, lest he should seem to be unrestrained, and the result of this imprisonment of his emotions was an appearance of calm which he was far from feeling. fie was very shy, shyer even than Mr Shaw, and unusually diffident about his own ability. How far that diffidence was due to his dislike of criticism and how far it was due to sheer humility 1. cannot say. He did not take criticism well—but who does?—although his resentment when it was expressed at all was geiitly expressed. He did not bluster, nor was he assertive in his manner. He was quicker to withdraw than to emerge. He loathed publicity, but he endured it with patience. My friend, Professor William Lyon Phelps, of Yale University, told me that he saw Galsworthy break into a cold sweat in America when he was told that he would be expected to speak, not read, a lecture. He nervously protested that he could not speak without long preparation. He was wrong about that. The best speeches I ever heard him make were those that he had to deliver on the spur of the moment. Galsworthy, indeed, was a very charming impromptu speaker, but Galsworthy himself could not believe that he was. His sense of duty was high. He would take any trouble to fulfil a task that he felt must be fulfilled. He was asked to write some articles on the humane slaughter of animals for the ‘Daily Mail ’ several years before the outbreak of the War, and he spent a great deal of time in visiting slaughter-houses in search of information, although these visits must have been very distressing to him. He took immense pains io get his facts right, and I remember him telling me of his visits to prisons when he was writing 1 Justice,’ and he consulted lawyers, although he was himself a barrister, on points of law, when these cropped up in his works. In spite of his care, however, he did not always satisfy the lawyers that his legal procedure was sound. Sir Charles Biron disputed his accounts of courts and law, nor was he abashed when Galsworthy retorted that he had taken counsel s opinion. My personal belief is that Galsworthy often allowed his emotions more exercise in his propaganda works than he ought to have done. When, for example, he was visiting slaughterhouses, he met a famous novelist in the Hampstead Tube Railway: one morning. The novelist inquired what he was doing, and Galsworthy replied: “ I’m doing a very strange thing., ,1 m visiting all the slaughter-houses ofLondon.” He then explained the nnrpose of his visits, and added: “Do: you know that every sheep suffers lull a minute of pain more than it noed. Multiply those half-minutes of needless pain by all the sheep that are slaughtered, and you get a lifetime of agony. The novelist leant forward and sud; “No, my dear Galsworthy, you den t. Each sheep suffers half a minute of needless pain. That is all. The quality and the defect or Galsworthy is apparent in that scrap of dialogue. He was always imagining that individual experience could be multiplied into crowd experience, and that the multiplied misery which lie imagined to be felt by the crowd was also the extent of the individual’s misery. That, I think, was his grave defect. His horror of pain and persecution yas so intense that he thought, there nas pain where there was little or none. He was almost incapable of believing that poor people do not spend thpr lives in perpetual misery. He astonished me by bis ignorance of panpeople. They might have hep creatures of another species lying in another world, so little mil knowledge had he of their lives. Jfo pitied them. Pity, indeed, was almost a vice with Galsworthy. ft hid scarcely any relation to reality. His life was economically easy. He hdcl never known privation. He had nevir bad to earn a living. ITo road for tfc Bar, but did ■ not practise, There wis

no hardship in his youth, as there was in that of Shaw and Wells and Conrad and Bennett. His contacts with poor people, therefore, were mainly those of an affluent man with impoverished persons. He saw them only as people to be pitied, and never as people with whom he had had an experience in common. He was a Detenpimst with a difference from Hardy, who was called a Pessimist with far less warrant than there was for calling Galsworthy one. “ The conviction that the forces of the universe are beyond our knowing seems to persist throughout the earlier works,” says Mr Onld: — It is mockery to talk of justice. There is no justice for men, for they are for ever in the dark. Small of no import; insects to be crushed and made an end of when the machine comes full circle. The blackness of this pessimism, not laboured, but implicit, is not dispelled by ‘ Fraternity,’ the book which followed ‘The Man of Property.’ Determinism still colours the author’s thought. Wo are like flies caught among the impalpable and smoky threads of cobwebs so men struggle in the webs of their own natures, giving here a start, there a pitiful small jerking, long sustained, and failing into stillness. ... But hero he denied his own belief by his life, for he continually strove to obtain justice for man. Why should any person strive to obtain what he believes to be unobtainable,, to be nonexistent?

The legend of the cold and reserved Englishman will not easily die, although it is evident to anybody with the slightest knowledge of the history of England that coldness and reserve were characteristics acquired only by one class, the middle-class, for a brief period, the middle years of the nineteenth century. Neither the aristocracy nor the working class at any time in English history has been cold or reserved. By a singular irony of fate, John Galsworthy, who had harrowed his emotions, came to be regarded as the coldest and most reserved Englishman of them all. Yet there never was a man who yielded to his feelings so ardently and so often as John Galsworthy. His handsome face, which became drawn and tired before he died, was full of feeling. Who could look into his fine, candid eyes and not know that he was deeply sensitive, or look at his flexible mouth and not realise that it trembled with emotion at the thought of any suffering. The burden of the world was too much for him, and the circumstances of his life prevented him from hardening himself. He felt for people in distress more than they felt for themselves. He was the very spirit of Pity. There were times, indeed, when he seemed as if he were determined to pity people, whether they needed pity or not, and in his illimitable but indiscriminate pity for people lie forgot to examine the facts, with the result that he sometimes pitied the wrong person. Ho was not, as he has often been acclaimed, an impartial man. How could he be when he was so full of indignation? His intense partiality, combined with his remarkable skill as a craftsman, enabled him to make honest officials look like villains. He seemed to forget, if he ever knew, that the strong have rights, too, that the weak are sometimes in the wrong. He had the 1 crowd’s tenderness for the “ little ’un,” and seldom stopped to think that the big man is always a lonely man, a man whose mere size excites animus against him. It is hard for a giant to obtain justice, but the law is always strained for pigmies. He was bigger than his hooks and plays. He was innately noble, a kind and generous and extraordinarily sensitive man, with a heart that beat with deep sympathy for men and women whom, in the deeps of his mind, he regarded as lost.