JOHN GALSWORTHY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21344, 19 November 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

JOHN GALSWORTHY

THE NOBEL PRIZE

BY KOTAIIE

The Nobel prize is worth £BOOO. Thero seems something incongruous in awarding so immense a sum for conspicuous services in scientific research or literature or the cause of peace. It is all very well to hand over a sum like that to the man who has notably served his day and generation by purchasing the lucky ticket in a sweepstake or a lottery; £IO,OOO would be a totally inadequate return for a month's posturing before the camera at Hollywood, and the magnificent enrichment of the life of mankind that month would contribute. But there is something ridiculous about the bestowal of such a reward on a man who has only thrust a little further back the frontiers of human ignorance or folly. It upsets all our standards and our ideas of value. No wonder Bernard Shaw handed his prize back.

But not many men of letters could resist temptation in the Shavian fashion. For one thing they probably have not amassed his fortune. For another, the supply of " Irish millionairesses," as Shaw gaily labels the lady of his choice in the ShawTerry letters, must be strictly limited, and even if they wero as plentiful as blackberries, the man of science or the literary man would not, as a general rule, bo in the running. Though one must admit that the Nobel prize usually conies, like most of life's prizes, to the successful man who needs it least.

The award to John Galsworthy will probably bo greeted with enthusiasm throughout Europe and all the Englishspeaking countries. Ho has won a place among the world's first men in two branches of literature. He has written some of the most significant plays of our time. His " Forsyte Saga " is one of the great achievements in modern fiption. What the future will have to say about him is on the knees of the gods. But his own generation has proudly placed him among the masters. The Patrician Galsworthy has the great preliminary advantage of looking exactly as ho ought to look. That is of more importance than might appear on the surface. Bernard Shaw conforms in face and figure to the image one instinctively creates of the author from his books. 11. G. Wells, on the other hand, never contrives to look like a man of letters and a fervid reformer. Arnold Bennett gazed superciliously down on the world like a Hollywood producer; the artist was very satisfactorily concealed. Mr. Baldwin is seriously handicapped as a statesman because he is in every line the sturdy successful farmer. Galsworthy's handsome features perfectly represent the patrician type. Their faultless regularity, the obvious marks of race, the austere calm—here, if anywhere, is the fine flower of the old English aristocratic culture. That he comes from the middle class does not affect the matter one jot. The most aristocratic face I have ever seen belonged to a Cockney who used to travel the country with a coconut-shy outfit. He would have been the most distinguished figure in the House of Lords. It does not do to judge by appearances, but a man has a great initial advantage if his appearance emphasises and confirms the picture of himself he has created through his selfexpression in his books. And whatever the foolish young modern may say about it, all art that is worthy the name must be in the highest sense and in every part a supreme revelation of the personality of the artist. Self-Revelation

Galsworthy has perfectly expressed himself in his books. He has not tried to do it. One imagines that self-revelation is as distasteful to him as it was to the average Englishman formed during the prewar generation. But all his values are there embodied in his books, the things he loves and the things he hates. His style never calls attention to itself. There is no conscious fine-writing. He never tries to be clever. He gives us no epigrams—nothing, in short, that is quotable, that sticks in the memory. The form is in subjection to the matter, a means to an end, never an end in itself. Yet in achieving its purpose it is as serviceable a style as any of our time, and in its efficient austerity it is a complete revelation of the man.

Galsworthy has been stirred to write because he is sure there is something very seriously wrong with society as it has evolved during the centuries. In all his books ho comes to that inevitable ■theme. He is a man of infinito charity and sympathy. He sees an England running on fixed lines of social usage. With the momentum of all tho past the great juggernaut grinds onward along its rails. But in its movement it crushes thousands of hapless lives, and these the best in many cases, and in every caso worthy of much more consideration than this blind adherence to traditional rule lets us give. It seems to him that we have created organisations and institutions for our service that have now becomo our blind but relentless masters. We devised society, or at least let it grow, to minister to our comfort or our safety or our prosperity. We are now chiefly bent on adapting ourselves to a cast-iron social structure. It suits us, perhaps; therefore, it must suit everybody. The great sin of our time is acquiescence, acceptance of what is now tyrannous and evil, first because wo lack the sympathy to understand other people's point of view, and perhaps chiefly because we are delivered over to a vile lethargy and inertia. Social Tyranny

In practically all his novels lio. shows individual emotion, passion, checked and crushed by the dead weight of social convention. 110 finds the evil in every stratum of society. It is a delect in our modern mentality. We value conformity as the chief preservative of our national heritage, and the non-conformist is an outcast, an alien. It is the English traditional, and in its place excellent, conservatism raised into a cruel and vicious system that crushes all the noblest instincts and strivings of the mind and soul.

In the " Island Pharisees " he propounds his general thesis. lie shows how through all England impulse is killed by convention, the individual self-expression by the tyranny of custom. In the various volumes of the " Forsyte Saga " and the " Modern Comedy " he shows the evil principle at work among the financial classes, the upper-middle class created by the vast material expansion of the Victorian era, the class to which he himself belongs. " The Patrician " pictures the same conflict in the highest' reaches of English society. "Fraternity" faces the same problem among the artists and professional men. " The Country House " is the same motif worked out among the landed gentry. If ho had felt ho had the requisite knowledge he would have covered every phase of English society. It is plain that he is, before all, a reformer. He is no pessimist. He does not write mo: sly to expose what cannot be helped, lie is sure the remedy lies in our hands if we could be spurred to take action. While he assumes the satirist, ho condemns always with the idea that he may be bringing in a better day. He feels the tyranny of society so bitterly, he looks out on life with so much sympathy and with so intense a hatred of injustice, that only the hope of amelioration could keep him going. For all the grimness and greyness of the world as he sees it ho takes his stand with the optimists who look forward to a nobler world.