The Depressed Philanthropist

I do not see why any one but myself should be interested in the mere fact that, except in the way of casual reference, I have always avoided writing a line about Mr. John Galsworthy. But as one’s feelings commonly typify those of some section or other of one’s fellows it may be relevant to one’s purpose. I frequently begin writing something about Mr. Galsworthy and then tear it up. I constantly feel like abusing him, and am then checked by the thought that after all he is too good a man to go for. He is a sensitive and humane man of very great intelligence. He is a conscientious writer and an acute observer. He has a great respect for truth and a desire to state it at all costs. He detests pettinesses, hypocrisies, and shams. On almost every issue that might arise I am sure I should find myself voting on the same side as he, though perhaps we might differ in our views of the relative importance to be attached to the problem of World Peace and that of the hardships inflicted by mankind on ants, wasps, and bees. And yet as I read his books I feel as if I were in some cheerless seaside lodging-house on a wet day.

I have just been reading his new miscellany The Little Man. The book does not show his qualities at their best, but it shows his defects at their worst. The principal contents are The Little Man and Studies in Extravagance. The first is a short play showing how a German, an American full of altruistic platitudes, and two self-contained and “proper” English people shrink in the most selfish and cowardly way from a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of course, for the sake of the extra irony) of typhus. The “studies” are examinations of various “types” such as “The Artist,” “The Plain Man,” “The Housewife,” “The Preceptor,” and “The Latest Thing.” And there is none of them good—no, not one. Mr. Max Beerbohm once did a cartoon of Mr. Galsworthy Looking upon Life and Finding it Foul, Life being represented as a fat and ferocious goblin with horns, a forked tail, and teeth like a wild boar’s. It was just a little wrong. Mr. Galsworthy’s vision should not have had so much of the positive about it. He does not find Life vigorously diabolical, but meanly cruel and pallidly contemptible. Many great men have been gloomy or pessimistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, Schopenhauer was consistently disgruntled, and the man who would look for joie de vivre in Leopardi would look in vain. And as Mr. Galsworthy suggests himself—it is a commonplace—it is often the duty of a serious contemporary writer to be horrifying, unpleasant, and shocking. The regeneration of mankind—to continue the commonplace—is not possible if we hold the view that things may be done that may not be discussed, and that the failings of man and the diseases of society should, as far as possible, be stowed away in the cupboard, where the skeletons are. What is wrong with Mr. Galsworthy is that one cannot quite believe him. One suspects him of cooking the evidence. One does not mind a man presenting a black view of life if (a) he is temperamentally inclined to it and can be melancholy with a certain gusto, or (b) if, being a professed realist, he appears to have taken cognizance of every aspect that has presented itself to him. But Mr. Galsworthy presents so one-sided a case that we at once suspect his bona fides and react against his views. It would be unfair to classify him with that school of novelists who give their books titles like Dull Monotony and live up to their titles by giving a photographic reproduction of an intolerable tedium peculiar to, and comprehensible by, the households which they themselves afflict. He usually escapes being thoroughly boring partly because of his gift for occasionally happy and incisive phrase and partly because here and there, behind the grey brow of the dejected Hanging Judge, one catches a gleam of something more exhilarating than his expressed sentiments. But he is often very nearly dull, all the same: for his realism is often bogus. He starts with an intention to paint a caricature in greys, and a caricature which is not amusing. Even in his very well-made plays the characters are not, to my mind, usually interesting in themselves. One does not believe in them as persons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and unreal as the old stage figures of melodrama, though they are called charwomen, clerks, magistrates, and company directors instead of being called Irishmen, highwaymen, and wicked baronets. His plays argue cases, but they do not present life as we know it. I find the same sort of unreality about his prose; and, since the unreality takes the form of making mankind look utterly paltry and uninteresting, one wonders why on earth a man who has such an opinion of it bothers about it at all.

So in The Little Man and in these studies. All these average people do not get a dog’s chance; we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but we really are not quite so dull, feeble, and silly as all this. Some characteristics—as those of the Plain Man—are very cleverly recorded, but the whole of the man is not here, nor even the most important parts of him. As an illustration of Mr. Galsworthy’s pseudo-realistic method take him on the ground most favourable to him—that of the beef-and-whisky-fed sportsman:

“What led to him was anything that ministered to the coatings of the stomach and the thickness of the skin ... to be ‘hard’ was his ambition, and he moved through life hitting things, especially balls—whether they reposed on little inverted tubs of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost always hit them, and told people how he did it afterwards. He hit things, too, at a distance, through a tube, with a certain noise....”

Now, apart from the fact that a full and accurate description of a sportsman would put in many things Mr. Galsworthy leaves out (e. g. some indication that he was a human being, as we know the species), this is not good, though it is superficially plausible description, even so far as it goes. The plain statement that the gentleman played golf and cricket and shot a good deal would convey a better idea of him than this specious circumlocution. To say that a man is smoking a cigarette positively contains a greater measure of suggestion than to say that he is inhaling grey fumes through a cylinder of paper filled with dried herbs. Much of Mr. Galsworthy’s attack upon all kinds of men and women, self-centred authors, idealists who oppress their wives, worldly women who have never found their souls, cultured people who chase the new, and Philistines who run away from the new, has the same sort of defect. It is really “guying” which passes for photography merely because it is heavy-footed and unamusing. I object to Mr. Galsworthy’s ostensible view of life partly because I don’t believe he takes it, and partly because if he did I should think it an absurdly unjust view. At heart a humanitarian, he has got into a dismal and costive kind of literary method which makes him look like a fretful and dyspeptic man who curls his discontented nostrils at life as though it were an unpleasing smell. As Ibsen used so often to remark, there is a great deal wrong with the drains; but after all there are other parts of the edifice.