31 January: Boreham on John Galsworthy

Sweetness and Light
Among writers of our time, is there one to whom we feel more deeply indebted than to John Galsworthy, the anniversary of whose death we mark today? To have read the Forsyth Saga is to have imbibed a liberal education, not only in letters but in life.

Galsworthy was one of the most magnetic and most dynamic figures of the years between the two wars. Rather above medium height, of well-proportioned and well-built frame, finely-chiselled face, kindly welcoming eyes, and possessing a voice that, though resonant and strong, was almost caressing in its softness, John Galsworthy, by his presence, gave an air of distinction to every circle in which he moved. He was, in the best sense of the term, the perfect gentlemen. He looked a gentleman; he spoke as a gentleman; he dressed as a gentleman; he behaved as a gentleman; he felt and thought as a gentleman; he was a gentleman.

He excelled in the gentleman's delicate art of putting his companion—whoever his companion might happen to be—delightfully at ease. He overawed nobody. In chatting with kings or with cabmen he was always himself. He never put on airs or stood upon his dignity.

The most celebrated men and women of his time revelled in his society. Little children, of whom he had none of his own, thought it as good as a holiday when he led their frolics or told them stories. His wife, even in sickness, found him the gentlest and most skilful of nurses, praising his velvety hands, while his horses and his dogs seemed to worship the ground he trod.

It was his wife who made an author of him. He had always longed to do such work, but felt it to be hopelessly beyond him. "Why don't you write? You're just the person!" exclaimed the girl whom he afterwards married. Galsworthy, who by this time had been called to the Bar, regarded the words as a challenge. He relinquished his chambers, announced that he had embraced literature as a profession, and settled down to write his first book.


Reaching Heights After Haunting Hollows
His first ventures by no means set the Thames on fire. They were kindly, though not enthusiastically, received; and the sales were fair. And then, having hovered uncertainly for nearly 10 years between the misty levels of mediocrity and the sunlit uplands of actual brilliance, John Galsworthy, in 1906, at the age of 39, produced the work that established him as one of the great masters. In that memorable year he published "The Man of Property," the first volume of the famous Saga, and also produced "The Silver Box," the first of his plays.

Galsworthy approached his 40th birthday with the pleasing consciousness that he had taken his place as one of the brightest stars in the literary firmament of his time. Men recognised that, in him they had an author who walked very closely with life. He was neither a dreamy idealist nor a vulgar realist. In all his novels and plays he submitted his characters to one acid test: Do men and women in real life talk and dress and behave like this?

He had no patience with figures in fiction who spend their time in making elaborate speeches to each other. Queen Victoria once complained that Mr. Gladstone addressed her as if she were a public meeting. The heroes and heroines of the old-fashioned novels had a similar ugly habit. John Galsworthy detested it, and determined to set a happier fashion.

Literature, so far as his work was concerned, should be a mirror held to the face of life. His men and women should be the sort of men and women whom one meets in banks and shops and restaurants and picture-shows and railway trains—ordinary but interesting, commonplace but lovable.

Inspired Himself, Galsworthy Inspires Others
John Galsworthy, who refused a knighthood, shares with Sir Hugh Walpole the distinction of having restored the massive and monumental novel to popular favour. "With all my heart," Walpole wrote to Galsworthy, "I congratulate you on bringing to completion so great a work. What a triumph to have created something that really beautifies the world and will go on doing so! You do not realise what a help your quietness and dignity are to many of us. The temptations to be cheap and nasty are now legion, and one has to hold on for dear life. When I hesitate I always think of you and you help me marvellously." It is not too much to say that, in these telling sentences, Sir Hugh Walpole spoke for all the writers of his time.

Galsworthy never moralised nor sermonised; yet, to him, his work was but a means to an end. The dominant passion of his life was to ameliorate the condition of all things that suffered. He laboured tirelessly to introduce mercy into slaughter-houses, to prevent vivisection of dogs, to remove ponies from the mines, and to open the cages of all wild birds. His play "Justice," revealed to Mr. Churchill, and to the public, the horrors of solitary confinement and led to a sensational reform in the treatment of prisoners.

Galsworthy made money at a prodigious rate, but he distributed it with a princely hand. On the day on which he received the Nobel Prize of £9,000 he gave away the entire amount. During the First World War he worked early and late, donating all his earnings to national funds. Mr. H. V. Marrat, who knew him intimately, declares that his outstanding characteristic was "an uncommon sweetness." By his masterly and masculine writings, John Galsworthy contrived to infuse the winsomeness and beauty of his own soul into the life and thought of the English people.

F W Boreham

Image: John Galsworthy