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                           WRITERS OF THE DAY

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                   GENERAL EDITOR: BERTRAM CHRISTIAN








                            JOHN GALSWORTHY

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                         _By SHEILA KAYE-SMITH_

                                _NOVELS_

_THE TRAMPING METHODIST_
_STARBRACE_
_SPELL LAND_
_ISLE OF THORNS_
_THREE AGAINST THE WORLD_
_SUSSEX GORSE_

                            _BELLES LETTRES_

_SAMUEL RICHARDSON_

                                  ---

_WILLOWS FORGE AND OTHER POEMS_

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[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY]

                                  JOHN
                               GALSWORTHY

                                   By

                           SHEILA KAYE-SMITH




[Illustration: colophon]




                                NEW YORK
                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




                       _First Published in 1916_




                                CONTENTS

                                                  PAGE

                 INTRODUCTION                        9

                 THE PLAYS. I.                      17

                 THE PLAYS. II.                     35

                 THE NOVELS. I.                     52

                 THE NOVELS. II.                    69

                 THE SKETCHES                       86

                 GALSWORTHY THE ARTIST             100

                 BIBLIOGRAPHY                      115

                 AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY             118

                 INDEX                             121




                              INTRODUCTION


A characteristic of every age is its group of popular writers. These
writers at once concentrate and give out the spirit of their age—they
are representative. Literature has many names of pioneers and apostles,
who were ahead of or out of sympathy with their times, but these were
never popular. The popular writer is essentially a man who conforms to
his period; it is true that his conformity must have life and vigour, it
must have nothing in it of the echo or the slave, it may even be
disguised rather transparently as revolt—but whatever enterprises and
excursions he allows himself, he remembers that there are certain bases
which he must keep, and to which after every expedition he must come
back. These bases are either the conventional ideas of his time, or the
conventional methods of attacking them—the two are for such purposes the
same.

So a glance at our most popular modern writers ought to give us a clue
as to the spirit of to-day. But here there is something baffling—we find
names as far apart as H. G. Wells and Florence Barclay, Arnold Bennett
and Hall Caine. Surely the spirit of the age is not broad enough to
include both Joseph Conrad and Marie Corelli. This brings us face to
face with a modern complication: we have two publics. The spread of
education, with other causes, has brought into being a mob-public, and
the approved of the mob-public have a popularity which could hardly have
been realised two generations ago. The most popular writer of to-day is
he whose appeal is to the man in the street, and the largest sales are
made by those who are most successful in catering for this newly
enfranchised reader—with whom literature and art have not hitherto had
much truck, but with whom they will have to reckon more and more as time
goes on.

There is, however, a public above the street, and this is large and
important enough to allow those who write for it to call themselves
popular. This public grants its favour on grounds literary as well as
emotional--it is not enough to stir its feelings, one must tickle its
taste. It is fundamentally the same as the mob in its ideas, but it is
very different in its methods of criticism. The mob likes to see its
prejudices upheld, this public above the street—which is the public that
most writers of any “literary” aspiration supply—while holding the same
prejudices as strongly at heart, rather enjoys seeing them overthrown on
paper. At the same time it demands artistic quality, reality, and an
occasional shock. While not actually _gourmet_, it is fastidious in the
matter of literary fare, and it is characteristically split up into
cliques or smaller publics, each swearing by a particular writer, just
as men who are nice as to food swear by a particular restaurant. There
is a Wells public, differing slightly if not essentially from the
Bennett public; there is a Kipling public—with democratic foundations;
there is a Conrad public, and a Galsworthy public—and the Galsworthy
public is perhaps the smallest of all.

Indeed Galsworthy can hardly be called a “popular” writer. I am not
using the word in a contemptuous sense, but to describe a writer who is
widely read. Galsworthy will never be widely read, for he alienates two
important sets of readers—those who insist that a book shall teach them
something, and those who with equal force insist that it shall teach
them nothing. He fails the first class because, while supplying its
demands, he does not satisfy the conditions it imposes. He undoubtedly
has something to teach, but he avoids the direct appeal, which is what
the public wants. Direct and open championship is the only way of making
a cause popular—let us be broad-minded, by all means, but agreeing that
“there may be something to say on the other side” is very different from
finding out what that something is, and saying it. Also he is too
sensitive, too moderate, too well balanced to please the
“improvement-above-all-things” reader, whose perceptions are not of the
subtlest.

On the other hand, he puts himself out of touch with those who do not
want to be taught, because he undoubtedly has a propaganda, and is not
an artist purely for art’s sake. Between himself and the numbers who
would unhesitatingly admire him as a man of letters he raises the
barrier of ideas which, while too subtly expressed to satisfy those who
clamour for instruction, are quite decided enough to cut off those who
object to it.

Thus Galsworthy’s public is whittled down to those who either are in
sympathy with his aims and methods—and there must be few who understand
both—or are able to swallow a small amount of propaganda for the sake of
art. He sets out to write deliberately for no man—he does not recruit
his readers, they are volunteers. They come to him from widely different
camps, and concentrate in an admiration which is perhaps as full of
reserves as its object.

He has deliberately rejected all public-snatching tricks, revealing his
personality in his work alone, avoiding the light of popular curiosity
and journalistic enterprise. He has treated his private life as his own
concern, not as a bait for readers. A judicious use of his own
personality and private affairs is, broadly speaking, indispensable to
the seeker after popularity. Galsworthy, by disliking this, has
necessarily limited his public to those who read him for his work’s
sake.

In the bare facts of his life that he chooses to give we shall find
nothing so interesting as what we find in his books and plays. Born in
1867, at Coombe in Surrey, he was educated at Harrow and at Oxford. He
was called to the Bar in 1890, but practised very little.

He has travelled a great deal, and widely—America and Egypt, Canada and
the Cape, British Columbia and Australia, Russia and the Fiji Islands.
It was on the sailing ship which carried him from Adelaide to South
Africa twenty-two years ago that he made friends with a