FORSYTES, PENDYCES AND OTHERS (Essays), by John Galsworthy.

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FORSYTES, PENDYCES AND OTHERS (Essays)

by John Galsworthy.

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CONTENTS

TRIBUTES TO CONRAD

PREFACE TO CONRAD’S PLAYS

HOMAGE TO ANATOLE FRANCE

JOHN MASEFIELD AND HIS NARRATIVE POEMS

NOTE ON ‘THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY’

PREFACE TO ‘GREEN MANSIONS’

NOTE ON W. H. HUDSON

NOTE ON EDWARD GARNETT

FOREWORD TO JEANNE D’ARC

NOTE ON MEGGIE ALBANESI

NOTE ON R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

FOREWORD TO ‘THE ASSEMBLED TALES OF STACY AUMONIER’

PREFACE TO ‘THE SPANISH FARM’

INTRODUCTION TO ‘BLEAK HOUSE’

PREFACE TO ‘ANNA KARENINA’

THE GREAT TREE

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Forsytes, Pendyces and Others.

Short stories and essays

selected by Ada Galsworthy

Unknown Binding – 1 Jan. 1935

by John Galsworthy (Author),

Ada Galsworthy (Author).

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4139508714

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TRIBUTES TO CONRAD

(SPOKEN AT WARSAW AND CRACOW)

"For thirty years my best and dearest friend in the writing world was your great fellow-countryman, Joseph Conrad Korzeniovski, one who, as you know, loved England well enough to live there, and become a British subject; and one who in his writing brought new blood and life into English Literature. Though he loved England, his love for his native Poland was very great; I have heard him many and many a time talking of it and of his kin over here. I met him first when he was still a sailor, before he had adopted the profession of letters, thirty-three years ago, ... "

" ... travelling over all those years, the early days come back most vividly; when with the earnestness of comparative youth we discussed all things in heaven and earth and some that seemed beyond those spheres; when Conrad was a writer already acclaimed by connoisseurs (as indeed he was from the very first), but struggling to make good in a world which in those days received unfamiliar genius very grudgingly; and I — I was unknown, a prentice writer trying to find his feet in the deep waters of expression. And I remember that even in those midnight discussions, how thickly pictures, facts, reminiscences, tales of his own adventures, impressions of the men and women he had met, starred his talk, so that we never became fogged in the gloom of the abstract and metaphysical, never lost touch with the tides of human nature. It was the great quality of Conrad that with all his sense of the cosmic, of the enveloping mystery of Nature, he kept ever to the touchstone of fact, never became theoretical and misty, never lost grip of human feeling."

"To him nothing that was human was foreign. Through all his work runs this prepossession with the warm human glow of actual life, and with the strange ironies, heroisms, and failings of human nature; it was one of the secrets of the hold he ultimately gained on our affections in England. For we in England are not a theoretical people. Our philosophy is very much a day-to-day concern — we hold by fact. And if there are qualities that we prize beyond others, they are the courage which meets Life as it runs, the common sense which accepts what is and tries to make the best of it, and loyalty to common tasks and ties. ... He was a writer with whom they felt they could put to sea and trust to stand by them. And that is more than one can say of many a writer whose blood is English.

"Partly because he was writing in a language not native to him, marvellously though he used it, he was sometimes too intricate and subtle for the English reader; sometimes, owing to his Slavonic blood, too brooding and conscious of Fate; but at bottom he and we believed in the same virtues of sober courage and positive loyalty, and we were proud that he became one of us."

"Conrad was a writer who especially appealed to painters. I can remember a time in those very early days when, besides the few literary connoisseurs who recognised his genius, most of his admirers in England seemed to be painters. And no wonder, for he literally painted with words in those earlier books. His visualising force was extraordinary, and only equalled by his native power of expression."

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(SPEECH AT THE CONRAD MEMORIAL, CRACOW)

" ... We in England owe a great debt to Cracow in that she gave us one who brought to English Letters something quite new; a richness of colouring, a variety of phrase, and a subtlety of conception such as we had not before he came to us. ... "

"A Slav, thinking equally well in Polish, French and English, but expressing himself wholly in the English language, you can readily see what a strange and important event to English Literature his work has been. ... "

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July 28, 2021 - July 28, 2021.

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PREFACE TO CONRAD’S PLAYS

This is included in, and was reviewed as part of, Castles In Spain.

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July 28, 2021 - July 28, 2021.

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HOMAGE TO ANATOLE FRANCE

" ... There has never been an age that so needed an Anatole France. Deep learning, wide and humane thinking, self-sacrificing craftsmanship, and an exquisite sense of balance, he had all that the age has not."

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July 28, 2021 - July 28, 2021.

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JOHN MASEFIELD AND HIS NARRATIVE POEMS

"When in November appeared that amazing poem, “The Everlasting Mercy,” the chorus of comment was of due warmth and enthusiasm. Now that The English Review of February publishes “The Widow in the Bye Street,” it is the more surprising to me that little notice has been taken of the event. ... "

" ... Though in The Tragedy of Nan John Masefield wrote a play with much beauty and much strength, it seems to me that not until he invented in these two narrative poems a form absolutely his own did he achieve complete felicity in the expression of a temperament unique among living writers. ... These two poems are, I feel, the result of one of these long creative moments. They have the same original form, capturing reality in terms of romance, and a particular quality — not, I think, yet pointed out — which for want of a better word I must call growth. They are not “made” things. They spring, vision by vision, thought by thought, with a certain fateful sureness, out of an overmastering mood. One feels from line to line that they could not be otherwise. And this is the greatest quality in a work of art. They remind one of sculpture, rather rough, but rough with the rugged, ragged, yet utter coherence of life running into its appointed shape. They have the epic feeling, never present in work epically resolved on. ... "

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Galsworthy quotes parts of a poem.

"All the tides triumph when the white moon fills.

Down in the race the toppling waters shout,

The breakers shake the bases of the hills,

There is a thundering where the streams go out,

And the wise shipman puts his ship about,

Seeing the gathering of those waters wan,

But what when love makes high tide in a man?...

"Love is a flame to burn out human wills,

Love is a flame to set the will on fire,

Love is a flame to cheat men into mire.

"Man cannot call the brimming instant back;

Time’s an affair of instants spun to days;

If man must make an instant gold, or black,

Let him, he may, but Time must go his ways.

Life may be duller for an instant’s blaze.

Life’s an affair of instants spun to years,

Instants are only cause of all these tears...."

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"If there be in our time a poem written that has this triumphant dirge-like beauty I have yet to know it."

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July 28, 2021 - July 30, 2021.

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NOTE ON ‘THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY’

(Henry James)

"THIS novel may be likened to a dish of fine tea that, set before a mental epicure, steals his approval with its aroma. It is to be sniffed before drinking, and drunk out of thin china, not at a draught. And the novel has on the faculties the same effect as tea. It stirs them, frees, and cools; it stimulates a gentle perspiration, a sense of curiosity, and of an unconscious intellectual mastery. After sipping this clear and fragrant liquid, we try to unravel subtleties which, when not thus delicately intoxicated, we leave alone."

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"The ‘Lady’ is married to Osmond — to Osmond, the very type of repellent egoism; Goodwood, strong, silent and devoted has kissed her. We are told that his kiss reached her senses; and then that she saw “a very straight path.” Two days later Goodwood is informed by Henriette that Isabel has started for Rome (and Osmond). He is cast down.

"“‘Just you wait!’ said Henriette. Goodwood looked up at her.”"

Suddenly one realises one has seen the film, within last two decades, and the inexplicable riddle of why the girl married the despicable guy, who remained so.

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July 30, 2021 - July 30, 2021.

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PREFACE TO ‘GREEN MANSIONS’

(W. H. Hudson)

This piece was included in Another collection of essays, reviewed recently.

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" ... Why do I love his writing so? I think because he is, of living writers that I read, the rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me the nature of that spirit. Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be explored; and each traveller in the realms of literature must needs have a favourite hunting ground, which, in his good will — or perhaps merely in his egoism — he would wish others to share with him."

" ... Without apparent effort he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you are refreshed, stimulated, enlarged, by going there."

" ... Hudson has indeed the gifts and knowledge of a Naturalist, but that is a mere fraction of his value and interest. A really great writer such as this is no more to be circumscribed by a single word than America by the part of it called New York. ... This unspoiled unity with Nature pervades all his writings; they are remote from the fret and dust and pettiness of town life; they are large, direct, free. It is not quite simplicity, for the mind of this writer is subtle and fastidious, sensitive to each motion of natural and human life; but his sensitiveness is somehow different from, almost inimical to, that of us others, who sit indoors and dip our pens in shades of feeling. Hudson’s fancy is akin to the flight of the birds that are his special loves — it never seems to have entered a house, but since birth to have been roaming the air, in rain and sun, or visiting the trees and the grass. ... "

" ... Somewhere Hudson says: “The sense of the beautiful is God’s best gift to the human soul.” So it is; and to pass that gift on to others, in such measure as herein is expressed, must surely have been happiness to him who wrote Green Mansions. In form and spirit the book is unique, a simple romantic narrative transmuted by sheer glow of beauty into a prose poem. Without ever departing from its quality of a tale, it symbolises the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life — that impossible perfection which we must all learn ... "

" ... Style should not obtrude between a writer and his reader; it should be servant, not master. To use words so true and simple, that they oppose no obstacle to the flow of thought and feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition of word-sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or gratification — this is the essence of style; and Hudson’s writing has preeminently this double quality. ... "

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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NOTE ON W. H. HUDSON

"WITH the passing out of W. H. Hudson the English-speaking world, perhaps the wide world, has lost its most unique personality. This is said deliberately out of some little knowledge of personalities and the world. He is quite irreplaceable. Happily, his work preserves for us his rare spirit and strange charm. I, who only knew him for twenty-four years, can of course remember him only as a man of mature age, for he was eighty when he died last month; but I can well credit the impression he made on those who knew’ him in youth and middle age. A very tall man — quite six feet two — with raven-black hair, a cast of feature that always reminded one of an eagle, and wonderful deep brown eyes; a fine horseman, a great walker; absolutely unself-conscious, independent, and original, I have heard old people describe him as the most striking figure they ever saw; indeed, he was that to the end of his days."

"England, the United States, the Argentine go shares in Hudson. His father was of Devonshire stock from — he has told me — Clyst, near Exeter; his mother of a New England family; the land of his birth and upbringing was the Argentine. One never saw him without thinking a little of old Spain, and of Indian horsemen sitting motionless gazing out over great spaces. His talk, which had no brilliancy, was yet the most truly original I have ever listened to, and it is quite wrong to speak of him as “slightly lacking in humour”; his sense of humour was very strong, but as peculiar and individual as everything else about him. No man I have known set less store by this world’s goods; he quite unaffectedly preferred to be poor, and poor he was almost to the end."

" ... The tastes, habits, affections, almost the beliefs, of his last years in Cornwall and London were practically the same as those of the little boy on the pampas seventy years ago. ... "

"I am glad to think he finished his last book. It was to be, if I remember, on a subject very deep — the Nature origins of music. He who had been listening-in to Nature all his life must have heard secrets worth telling us about the beginnings of the first art.

"I am glad to think he died in his sleep without the pang of a good-bye.

"As a rule I do not worship heroes — no rule but has its exception."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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NOTE ON EDWARD GARNETT

"IN the brief, but wide, searching, and sympathetic study of Tolstoy that Edward Garnett has contributed to Constable’s Modern Biographies, he has insisted first and foremost on the necessity for remembering the many-sidedness of Tolstoy, for not losing sight of the war between the artist and the moralist, that was always being waged, and the fusion of them that was always going on in his colossal spirit. ... If, to remembrance that Tolstoy’s vitality was terrific, that his love of sheer truthfulness has never been surpassed, we add Dostoievsky’s dictum that he was “one of those Russian minds which can only see that which is before their eyes,” we begin to get understanding of a nature that ever lived and worked at full pressure, and was never at peace. We begin to realise how — just as all Nature is the result of the clash and fusion of opposing principles, so was the great nature and work of him whom, however one may love and admire Turgenev, and stand amazed at Dostoievsky, I, at all events, must think the greatest of the Russians."

"During the past twenty years and more Edward Garnett has “discovered” more talent, helped more aspiration, and fought more battles for the cause of good literature than anyone who can be named; and he has done it nearly all in the dark, and all for love of the real thing. He has never turned aside, never been swayed a hair’s breadth by the tides of popular feeling; he has had his own vision and been true to it. Often and often he has howled in a wilderness the unknown names of those now seated in high places. ... Criticism, of course, is very much an affair of temperament, and according to our natures we must all differ, but what makes one man a real critic and another only a licensed pronouncer of opinions is just that exceedingly rare faculty of ploughing up your surface afresh, and watering it with hope, ready for each new book, always believing that you are going to find something good, something that will crown letters with delight, and, revealing the springs of life, make for the enrichment of art and knowledge. Edward Garnett has, it seems to me, always wanted to find something good, always made himself ready; but he has never compromised with his instincts, never persuaded himself that what he did not like was good, or feared to justify and champion what he did like. It is twenty years since that quiet little revolution in English fiction began with our first knowledge of the Russians, through Constance Garnett’s translations of Turgenev, and Edward Garnett’s prefaces thereto. Now, the peculiar quality, the one quality in which the Russians excel all other writers of fiction, is spiritual truthfulness, a sort of natural power of putting forth impressions and experience unstained by self-consciousness. It is this quality which Edward Garnett seems to have been born to nurse and foster; and his incessant championship in the face of the solemn oppositions and false romanticism has vitally contributed to the sincerity and revealing force of modern English fiction. He has been the lifelong enemy of inflation, the lifelong friend of truth delicately recorded. ... "

" ... From time immemorial it has been the fashion of British fiction, fortified by British criticism, to think that it does not much matter how a thing is said, a story told, so long as it is told. Into this fashion Edward Garnett’s instinctive horror of inflation and irrelevance has cut with a depth that few perhaps realise. The value of a real critic is not to be measured by his actual writings, but by the force of his personality, persistently expressed in many ways that do not leap to the eye. ... It is a lighthouse hardly seen by the landsmen public, known only to us navigators of the shoals and crosscurrents of fiction."

" ... However much we fiction writers are inclined to shut our eyes to what may be destructive of our pet luxuriances, every now and then we open them, and there is the lamp, only visible to us, perhaps, but none the less invaluable for that."

"Truly, it is an odd comment upon the values of life, that, when a man is self-forgetful, when his love for what he does surpasses his love for himself, he is generally found to be more or less effaced. Here is one who has never beaten upon a tenpenny drum. How many are there, I wonder, who know his real worth!"

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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FOREWORD TO JEANNE D’ARC

(Play by Edward Garnett)

"Forewords do not sell books; on the contrary — they only irritate critics. Why, then, publishers should be so anxious to obtain them, no one knows, certainly not this writer.

"I will confine my words to the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. I am told that this play was described as a ‘misfire.’ If you go to a play, no matter what the subject, hoping to be made to laugh, if you expect a dramatist to convert the most tragic of historical themes into a vehicle that shall bear him to greater heights of popular esteem, if indeed, whatever the ailment, you desire ‘the mixture as before,’ then, I suppose, the trial of Jeanne d’Arc was a ‘misfire.’"

"Admitting that the audience, at the few performances which were given, was always of a serious temper, it was impressive to watch their attitude throughout. The word ‘misfire’ had not occurred to them. They sat in a sort of comfortless reverence, and though I should have expected them to say now and again: ‘I seem to have heard that before,’ or: ‘Enough about these voices,’ they did not. They were not amused, but they were absorbed and carried back into the atmosphere of the time."

"Watching the play, I realised, as never before, how fatal to the full current of emotion constant change of scene can be; and the last scene was ruined by the procession to the execution passing in front of the group who have been watching its formation. Essential that we should see that procession beyond, and as it were, with their eyes. In spite of these defects the staging on the whole was good, and plunged one far back into medievalism; it preserved the single-hearted emotion of the play clear and tense from start to finish; and thereby one received a coherent view of the gallant and tortured Jeanne. I will confess that the culmination moment came after the play was over, when the actress re-appeared to take our plaudits. While she stood there, silent and suffering, the still dignity of her young face and figure was a perfect tribute to the sincere and sustained emotion that the play had exacted from her. A dramatist for once had known when to stop."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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NOTE ON MEGGIE ALBANESI

"MEGGIE ALBANESI: I only saw her play seven parts in all ... and yet her death gives me a sense of eclipse. It is as if the Dark Remover had filched the brightest, steadiest little lantern of all."

" ... She had a curious and unique faculty of emotional truth. I never saw her (and I watched her through some sixty rehearsals) fumble, blur, or falsify an emotional effect. She struck instantaneously and as if from her heart, the right note of feeling. Those who have had much to do with play production alone will understand how excessively rare such a quality is. ... "

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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NOTE ON R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

"The short story is a form of fiction in which but few English have excelled, and none have reached the super-eminence of de Maupassant or of Anton Tchehov. It is a form in which, for perfection, an almost superhuman repression of the writer’s self must go hand in hand with something that one can only describe as essence of writer — a something unmistakable but impalpable, and not to be laid finger on. In the perfect short story one is unconscious of anything but a fragrant trifle, so focused and painted before our minds, that it is as actual, and yet as rounded, as deep in colour, as fine in texture as a flower, and which withal disengages a perfume from — who knows where, that makes it a carnation not a rose, a Maupassant and not a Tchehov.

"Now Cunninghame Graham sometimes — as in Hegira, A Hatchment, and other stories — approaches this perfection. I am not sure that he ever quite reaches it, for a reason that, curiously, is his real strength as a writer. Very much of an artist, he is yet too much of a personality ever to be quite the pure artist; the individuality of the man will thrust its spear-head through the stuff of his creations. I may be wrong, but I cannot honestly recall any story of his in which his knight-errant philosophy does not here and there lift its head out of the fabric of his dreams, if not directly, then through implicit contrast, or in choice of subject. ... "

"The bent of his soul, and the travels of his body have inclined him to those parts of the earth — the pampas, Morocco, Spain, Scotland — where there are still gleams at all events of a life more primitive, more aesthetically attractive, and probably saner than our own ... "

"With his style I personally have sometimes a fault or two to find, but I recognise in it to the full those qualities of colour, vibration, and sense of the right word that alone keep life beating in a tale. Without high power of expression philosophy is of little use to any artist, weighting his pockets till he is sitting in the road instead of riding along it with his head up, as this writer always does. He has a manner, and a way with him, valuable at a time when certain leading writers have little or none at all. And he has a passion for the thing seen, that brings into his work the constant flash of revelation. He makes us see what he sees, and what he sees is not merely the surface.

"Withal he is a gallant foe of oppression, of cruelty, of smugness, and fatty degeneration; a real tonic salt to the life of an age that needs it."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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FOREWORD TO ‘THE ASSEMBLED TALES OF STACY AUMONIER’

"The word ‘great’ has been so overdone, and the word ‘genius’ is so flyblown, that I shall use neither. Suffice it to say that Stacy Aumonier is one of the best short-story writers of all time, and that there is certainly no one more readable. And yet he, so untimely gone from us, has not yet attained the full eminence which is his due, and which I believe this volume will secure for him. It is for all and every; it will not date; it is gay reading, yet has the depth of a queer truth and wisdom. In it we find the cream of his literary output, for he was essentially a short-story writer rather than a novelist. ... "

"This was a temperament singularly fitted for the re-creation of life’s little comedies and tragedies. The first essential in a short-story writer is the power of being interesting, sentence by sentence. Aumonier had this power in prime degree. You do not have to ‘get into’ his stories. He is especially notable for investing his figures with the breath of life within a few sentences. ... There was, indeed, something Gallic in Aumonier’s temperament, or at least in his talent — not in his style, which is very English, but in his way of envisaging his subjects. This is not remarkable, considering his name and his face; but in spite of his French look and his Huguenot origin, he was truly English in his humour and attitude to life. French in mind, he was English in heart; for no Frenchman — not even Monsieur André Maurois — could have conceived Alfred Codling—’the man of letters,’ or ‘the Great Unimpressionable,’ or ‘The Grayles,’ or the waitress in ‘Overboard,’ or written ‘The Match,’ that perfect piece of English atmosphere.

"A short-story writer is always beset by the temptation to be inventive rather than creative or even recreative. This is a temptation to which Aumonier rarely if ever succumbed. He was profoundly in love with life, and impregnated through and through by curiosity about life and its manifestations, whether simple or queer. All types were fish to his net; and he has given us the fruits of his passion for and his curiosity about existence with a deft and always interesting fidelity. And with what sympathy he can hit off character! ... He had faith, too, in the unbelievable, and he could make it real, as the unbelievable so often is in life. His humour is sly and dry and frequent and wholly delightful. And how he puts his finger on weak spots! Yet with what restraint he satirises!

"Stacy Aumonier is never heavy, never boring, never really trivial; interested himself, he keeps us interested. At the back of his tales there is belief in life and a philosophy of life; of how many short-story writers can that be said? He understands the art of movement in a tale, he has the power of suggestion, he has a sense of line that most of us should envy; he is wholly uninfluenced by the dreary self-consciousness of novelty for novelty’s sake. He is not tricky. He follows no fashion and no school. He is always himself. And can’t he write! Ah! far better than far more pretentious writers. Nothing escapes his eye, but he describes without affectation or redundancy, and you sense in him a feeling for beauty that is never obtruded. He gets values right, and that is to say nearly everything. The easeful fidelity of his style has militated against his reputation in these somewhat posturing times. But his shade may rest in peace, for in this volume, at least, he will outlive nearly all the writers of his day."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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PREFACE TO ‘THE SPANISH FARM’

"For four years and three months the British Army was in France, many thousands of educated Englishmen were in touch with French character, and, so far as I know, Madeleine in this book is the only full, solid, intimate piece of French characterisation which has resulted from that long and varied contact. Madeleine is amazingly lifelike. I suspect her to be a composite creation rather than drawn directly from one living prototype; however that may be, there she is, an individual Frenchwoman of the north, firm as ever stood on excellent legs — no compromise about her outlines, nothing fluffy and nothing sketchy in her portrait from beginning to end. She imposes herself, page by page, with tenacity, her clear knowledge of what she wants, her determined way of getting it, her quick blood, her business capacity, and once more, her tenacity — the tenacity which has kept the Spanish farm in her family since the days of Alva. Besides being a warm-blooded, efficient, decisive human being, with a wonderful eye to the main chance, she is evidence on French character extremely valuable to those among us who really want to understand the French.

"And the minor portraits of her lover Georges, and his old parents, of her father, her sister, and the housekeeper at the château, with the young English officer as foil, fill in a convincing picture of French life and atmosphere in the war zone. ... "

" ... The Spanish Farm is not precisely a novel, and it is not altogether a chronicle; and here the interest comes in — quite clearly the author did not mean it to be a novel, and fail; nor did he mean it to be a chronicle, and fail. In other words, he was guided by mood and subject-matter into discovery of a new vehicle of expression — going straight ahead with that bold directness which guarantees originality. ... You do not put it down saying: “I see perfectly what form the fellow was trying for, but he didn’t bring it off.” You put it down thinking: “The fellow didn’t seem to be trying for any form, but he did bring it off.”"

" ... It is, anyway, a very interesting book, with a just — if unexpected — title, for one never loses consciousness of Madeleine’s home, that solid farmstead of French Flanders, named in the Spanish wars of centuries ago, and still in being, after the greatest war of all time."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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INTRODUCTION TO ‘BLEAK HOUSE’

WAVERLEY EDITION (Charles Dickens)

"What strikes me particularly, coming fresh again to this early love, is the utter readableness of it all. It remains untouched by all the literary water that has flowed since. There is, I suppose, within the covers of this book, no rule or canon of what we call aesthetics that is not forty times violated. There is neither line nor shape; neither coherent inevitability, nor moral discovery. The plot is coincidental and melodramatic; the characters for the most part caricatures. Moralising stalks unashamed, the humour is often blatant, and the pathos has been dipped in treacle. The style has no peculiar grace. All the little gods of art blush all over their little faces at every other page. And yet — ! The sheer fecundity of it; the sheer vitality; the sweep and range; the compelling, strange, haphazard felicity! ... Search these pages, you will find nothing that does not come out of a fine and generous heart, a heart that hated meanness, and hated cruelty — those twin and only real vices of mankind; and you will find nothing that, however queerly said, was not worth saying. The instinctive wisdom of it all; the marvellous way in which the finger of the writer’s mood traverses the trappings and the wrappings, and finds the true pulsation and heart-beat of things!

"Though by the pen of Dickens England was created — an England more living, on the whole, than the real article — it sometimes seems to me that there never was an English writer so un-English. That dryness in our blood and bones, which comes of a wet climate; our thin and cranky stiffness; our horrid terror of neighbours’ eyes — he had them not. He was in flux; a volcano ever active; and the mountains he threw up had more variety of shape than all the hills of all our other writers of fiction put together."

" ... That he was always less successful with his angelic conceptions is only to say that the heroic is a theme for poetry, and not for prose. The novelist who looks up to his characters can never make them live. ... They have no wings, and for that are the nearer to heaven. Is “the beautiful character” — so generally female — ever convincing? I do not think I know of one in the whole range of fiction. Perhaps, one should rather phrase it thus: Is there a single character in all fiction, who rivets and enchants us, unless his or her foibles, as well as virtues, have been seen and painted? I have yet to find that extraordinary fowl. The presentation of heroism is a too subtle thing to be achieved by the frontal attack — its glow is soon damped-down by worship. It must capture you unawares by fugitive gleams; it must peer at you mysteriously from out of the clay. ... "

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Galsworthy quotes a passage from Dickens.

"‘My instructions are, that you are to move on. I have told you so five hundred times.’

"“‘But where?’ cries the boy.

"“‘Well! Really, constable, you know,’ says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt; ‘really that does seem a question. Where, you know?’

"“‘My instructions don’t go to that,’ replies the constable. ‘My instructions are that this boy is to move on.’”"

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"When I was a boy, reading him with passion, I but vaguely glimpsed his glorious tourney; now that I know the world a little and have seen God’s own Bumbles, I never tire of standing by the roadside with a humble hat in hand, to see his gallant and great spirit ride past."

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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PREFACE TO ‘ANNA KARENINA’

"TOLSTOY is a fascinating puzzle. So singular an instance of artist and reformer rolled into one frame is not, I think, elsewhere to be found. The preacher in him, who took such charge of his later years, was already casting a shadow over the artist-writer of Anna Karenina. There is even an indication of the moralist in the last part of that tremendous novel: War and Peace. About his work, in fact, is an ever-present sense of spiritual duality. It is a battlefield on which we watch the ebb and flow of unending conflict, the throb and stress of a gigantic disharmony. ... "

"In choosing a single novel to label with those words so dear to the confectioners of symposiums, ‘The greatest ever written,’ I would select War and Peace. In it Tolstoy rides two themes, like a circus-rider on his two piebald horses, and by a miracle reaches the stable door still mounted and still whole. The secret of his triumph lies in the sheer interest with which his creative energy has invested every passage. The book is six times as long as an ordinary novel, but it never flags, never wearies the reader; and the ground — of human interest and historical event, of social life and national life — covered in it, is prodigious. A little, but not much, behind that masterwork, comes Anna Karenina. Also of stupendous length, this novel contains, in the old prince, in his daughter Kitty, in Stepan Arkadyevich, Vronsky, Levin, and Anna herself, six of Tolstoy’s most striking characters. He never drew a better portrait than that of Stepan Arkadyevich — the perfect Russian man of the world; the writer of this preface has known the very spit of him. The opening chapters, describing him at an unkind moment in his fortunes, are inimitable. As for the portrait of Anna’s husband, Alexey Alexandrovich — it inspires in us the feelings that he must have inspired in Anna. The early parts of this great novel are the best, for I have never been convinced that Anna, in the circumstances shown, would have committed suicide. It is as if Tolstoy had drawn her for us with such colour and solidity in the beginning, that we cannot believe she is not in the end dismissed by him rather than by herself. Anna, in fact, is a warm pulsating person, with too much vitality to go out as she did. The finish strikes one as voulu, as if the creator had turned against his creature; and one forms the opinion that Tolstoy started on this book with the free hand of an unlimited sympathy and understanding, but during the years that passed before he finished it, became subtly changed in his outlook over life, and ended in fact a preacher who had set out as an artist. It is, however, no uncommon flaw in writers to misjudge the vitality of their own creations. An illustration of the same defect is the suicide of Paula in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Ladies with her sort of past have too much vitality to put a period to themselves, except in plays and novels. With this reservation Anna Karenina is a great study of Russian character, and a great picture of Russian society — a picture that held good, with minor variations, up to the war.

"Tolstoy’s method in this novel, as in all his work, is cumulative — the method of an infinity of facts and pictorial detail; the opposite of Turgenev’s, who relied on selection and concentration, on atmosphere and poetic balance. Tolstoy fills in all the spaces, and leaves little to the imagination; but with such vigour, such freshness, that it is all interesting. His style, in the narrow sense, is by no means remarkable. All his work bears the impress of a mind more concerned with the thing said than with the way to say it. ... To have life and meaning, art must emanate from one possessed by his theme. The rest of art is just exercise in technique, which helps artists to render the greater impulses when — too seldom — they come. ... "

" ... His native force is proved by the simple fact that, taking up again one of his stories after the lapse of many years, one will remember almost every paragraph. ... "

" ... In the light shed by history and more recent analysts we must be permitted to doubt whether Tolstoy really understood the Russian peasant, whom he elevated into a sort of arbiter of life and art. Perhaps he understood them as well as an aristocrat could; but he is not so close to the soul and body of Russia as Tchehov, who came of the people and knew them from inside. In any case, the Russia of Tolstoy’s great novels: War and Peace and Anna Karenina, is a Russia of the past, perhaps only the crust of that Russia of the past — now split and crumbled beyond repair. How fortunate we are, then, to have two such supreme pictures of the vanished fabric!"

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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THE GREAT TREE

"WHEN the human spirit, joyful or disconsolate, seeks perch for its happy feet, or stay for flagging wings, it comes back again and again to the great tree of Shakespeare’s genius, whose evergreen no heat withers, no cold blights, whose security no wind can loosen.

"Rooted in the good brown soil, sunlight or the starshine on its leaves, this great tree stands, a refuge and home for the spirits of men.

"Why are the writings of Shakespeare such an everlasting solace and inspiration?

"Because, in an incomprehensible world, full of the savage and the stupid and the suffering, stocked with monstrous contrasts and the most queer happenings, they do not fly to another world for compensation. They are of Earth and not of Heaven. ... "

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July 31, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

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July 28, 2021 - July 31, 2021.

Forsytes, Pendyces and Others.

Short stories and essays selected by Ada Galsworthy

Unknown Binding – 1 Jan. 1935

by John Galsworthy (Author),

Ada Galsworthy (Author)

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000X9Z9OU

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Saturday, July 31, 2021

FORSYTES, PENDYCES AND OTHERS (Essays), by John Galsworthy.

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