John Galsworthy's Plays
The Plays of John Galsworthy. (Duckworth. 8.1. 6d.)
ARE we to conclude, then—holding this plump volume of Mr. Galsworthy's collected plays—that his work for the stage is
over ? Why should we ? Were there not other Forsytes after
The Forsyte Saga ? Dramatists are always withdrawing, after a failure ; always resuming, after success. With Mr.
Galsworthy success and failure, popular and artistic, have been pretty equally divided. He is too conscientious, too earnest, to be deflected from his course by either.
The series here reprinted opens with The Silver Box. And what a success that was, under the ever-memorable Vedrenne- Barker 'management, at the Court Theatre, in 1900 ! Here, we thought, is a dramatist who follows the realistic, or, as he prefers to call it, the " naturalistic " method., softened by imaginative sympathy. Later, this draniatist was to talk, in certain " Vague Thoughts on Art," of " Equipoise Supreme." Well, this little story of two men of different classes who stole under the influence of drink, the one to be punished by law, the other to escape by-the power of his father's purse, seemed to exhibit a perfect balance.'-' It looked natural, inevitable. Nobody seemed to be pulling strings. And so it was, with only occasional faults of emphasis and unconscious personal interventions, with Mr. Galsworthy's other triumphs, which, as most playgoers will probably agree, are, in chronological order, Strife, Justice, The Skin Game, Loyalties and Escape. These at least do not account for the reaction to-day against his work amongst the highbrows who are so very careful not to be caught applauding the wrong thing.
Joy, his second play, was a satirical comedy. In it there appears the first of those meant-to-be-sympathetic onlookers whom Mr. Galsworthy cannot resist inserting, every now and then, for purposes of mild ironical comment. She is a governess, a Miss Beech, who sets captive worms free, courts the com- panionship of earwigs, and, when she swallows a fly, says : " Poor thing ! "—meaning the fly. Miss Beech is no doubt designed to infuse the required dose of tolerant commiseration, to bring in a providential " Equipoise Supreme,- which ought, however, to remain concealed at the back of a writer's mind, guiding his inspiration ; never to become explicit or external- ized as a rather unreal bore who is also bad comic relief.
But Miss Beech has had, unfortunately, a line of successors of various walks in life—sometimes garrulously lower- class " raisonneurs, like Mr. Bly in Windows, or Bob Leminy in Foundations ; sometimes middle-class, like the intolerable photographer in Exiled, with his if I may say so " as a stage tag. In order to make these talkers less moral, Mr. Galsworthy endeavours to make them funny, and in order not to be always earnest he indulges in such jokes as the cellar scene (with imaginary bomb, portentous footman and butler) in Founda- tions, the exaggerations of A Family Man, the slipper hunt for a mosquito in The Roof, the minor pleasantries of Old English. And these plays suggest, next, that fantasy—the sort of fantasy so well exhibited by Mr. Shaw in The Apple Cart--is not Mr. Galsworthy's vein.
Nor does he succeed in obvious " poetry,- as in A Bite' Lore and much of The Mob ; especially the last dumb scene which reveals the London monuments of the martyred hero perched upon by sparrows—" poor things ! " Plain reporting of a significant and carefully chosen incident, vivified by a " crav- ing to identify himself with the experience of others "—this is the formula that does net mislead Mr. Galsworthy. The odd thing is that he does not seem to know when lie is departing from it.
" Let me have no temperament for the time being " he has written somewhere, in expressing his aspiration for absolute impartiality. Almost. impossible, is it not ?. But, anyhow, a stern creed for the dramatist. And it is just because he has bravely' chosen so severe a technique that Mr. Galsworthy's - -occasional inaccuracies in detail, irrelevancies in incident,
sentimentalities in phrase, mark some of his plays much lower than the others. Little mistakes—slips of the pen—have, in his method, the terribly cumulative effect of turning reality into farce or pathos. All depends upon 'delicate fingering and long-meditated choice.
The reviewer of all these plays hardly likes to appear un- grateful to Mr. Galsworthy by asking, finally, whether he has created any characters likely to live. One must perhaps ruefully answer " No." The predominantly-civic obsession of the author has led him rather to fix upon types, or at least " persons," that easily fit into a widely-swept social scene, than to concentrate on complicated private minds. We have here no Rosmersholm, no Wild Duck. But of that we must not complain. The dramatist of complete genius is perhaps the rarest of all literary artists.
RICHARD JENNINGS.
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