fectly serve Mr. Galsworthy: The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.' And for both the great instrument towards this end is art. Says Shelley, 'The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.' For Mr. Galsworthy, too, though the method and the immediate aim of art is pleasure, its effect places it amongst the greatest of moral forces: 'Art is the one form of human energy which really works for union and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of one self by another.'

This close parallelism between the fundamental ideas of Mr. Galsworthy and the most purely idealistic of English poets deserves emphasis, since the determined naturalism of Mr. Galsworthy's artistic method has apparently disguised his idealism from a large part of the public. Shelley's mind was baffled and repelled by contemporary existence, and his passionate zeal for the progress of humanity found expression in an abstract world of wonderful dreams, into which he could charm others by the supreme power of his lyrical genius. Mr. Galsworthy's idealism clings to the actual as resolutely as Shelley's shunned it. His chosen material is contemporary life in its everyday aspects. His persons range between the accidental thief and the middle-class member of Parliament, the workman and the company director, the charwoman and the colonel's wife. And like the persons, the incidents selected by Mr. Galsworthy are fruit of the commonplace. A young man about town, in drunken malice, takes his mistress's reticule and purse,

to score her off'. A labourer, out of work, driven by despair to hate society, in turn steals the purse and a silver cigarette-box. The theft by the well-to-do man is hushed up; the labourer, for his theft, is sent to prison. That is the story of The Silver Box. In Joy a wife, unhappy in her marriage, finds a lover, but is torn between love of him and of her daughter; the daughter struggles jealously to keep her mother for herself alone, but when she in turn falls in love, forgets everything else in her own 'special case'. Strife deals with the futile tragedy of a great strike, which ends in a compromise that breaks the extremist on either side. Justice shows a weak man forced by circumstances to one false step; ruined by a criminal system which acts without discrimination; and at last driven to suicide as the one way of escape from the fell clutch of circumstance. The Eldest Son sets forth the breakdown of a shallow habitual morality before class tradition and family interest: a country gentleman compels one of his gamekeepers, who has compromised a girl, to marry her, but resists passionately when his eldest son wishes in like case to marry his mother's maid. The Pigeon is a study in the relations between some of the destitute and those who try to relieve them; the cold theorists fail, and such help as can be given comes from the 'pigeon', whom the theorists bully and the vagabonds exploit, but who has the gift of loving his fellow creatures.

In all these plots, there is not a single incident foreign to common experience. Mr. Galsworthy is wedded to the actual. The closeness of the bond appears if we compare him in this respect with Mr. Shaw. Whether Mr. Shaw is handling contemporary matters or a story more remote, he selects and emphasizes the abnormal-the bizarre, or at least the unorthodox-in character or circumstance. Mr. Galsworthy is content with the dramatic possibilities of the commonplace. More his determined sincerity refuses the obvious legitimate method of heightening the interest of a commonplace

story-Ibsen's method of packing the apparently commonplace with great psychological significance. Think how Ibsen would have handled the story of The Silver Box. Would he not have shown Jack torn by a moral conflict? Should we not have felt that the occasion marked a crisis in his soul's history, and have seen him divided between the instinct to tell the truth and bear exposure, and the desire to save himself? Would not Mr. and Mrs. Barthwick and Roper have appeared as symbols of the forces striving to bind him to easy silence, to cripple his freedom of judgement and responsibility of action? And would not the end of the play have shown Jack either a new man through his own emancipating deed, or damned by his failure to abject littleness, to very death of personality? Instead, Jack suppresses the truth and lets Jones suffer and saves himself; then 'throwing up his head walks with a swagger to the corridor'. He has wished to act fairly; he has dimly felt that Jones is no more a criminal than he; in the magistrate's condemnation of Jones as a nuisance to society' he recognizes the very words used to himself by his father; but no flash of vision follows. He remains without essential change; ashamed for a moment, with another mean weakness on his record, but still merely weak, not a bad fellow. Mr. Galsworthy sees all the inner tendencies of character, but he refuses to emphasize them.

6

In this method there is a deliberate surrender of one great source of dramatic effect. Mr. Galsworthy has fine command of the dramatic moment, as we shall see later; he could have heightened the tension of the trial scene had he chosen. But in doing so he would have diverted attention from his main theme-the exact parallelism between the drunken, mischievous, unpremeditated theft committed by Jack, and that committed by Jones; their equal insensibility to any serious moral aspect of their actions; and yet the difference in the treatment of the two cases.

In choice of material and in conception, then, Mr. Galsworthy is above all faithful to life as he sees it; but this very intentness on the exact fact carries with it limitations. All art reveals a vision of the world and of life seen through a temperament. The greatest artists disguise nothing and distort nothing; but seeing wide as well as deep, they find balance and harmony in the whole. They see ugliness and beauty, sorrow and joy, cruelty and pity, terror and triumphant faith, weakness and strength-not isolated, but blended in infinite variety; and the greatest artists thus preserve, in the revelation of each aspect of life, the truth of a wider vision. So Homer and Euripides, Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière, Goethe and Browning, Fielding, Balzac, and Meredith. It is not a question of optimism or pessimism, or even of the selection of comic or pathetic or tragic material; it is a question of width of outlook and health of vision. Less great artists fix their gaze on one part of life; and because they overlook the rest, they lose perspective in the facts they see. So Mr. Galsworthy sees all life gray because he is intent on its gray incidents. The pathetic elements in life force themselves always upon him.

To each his sufferings; all are men
Condemned alike to groan,

The tender for another's pain,

The unfeeling for his own.

The balance of effect in Mr. Galsworthy's work is never on the side of happiness. In Joy, the young lovers are for a time happy, because at the moment they have forgotten everything but themselves. But even for them one forebodes ultimately the flickering out or at least the troubling of the clear flame; they will grow to be merely habitual mates, like the Colonel and Aunt Nell, with occasional soft memories to sweeten their mutual criticisms. The Pigeon, despite the humour and charm of the title-part and some admirable incidental comedy, leaves a grim impression; and

everywhere else gray tones predominate. In The Silver Box, and Strife, and Justice what is there of hope and joy? Every person means well-Mr. Galsworthy is no cynic-but the gleams of kindly feeling do not dispel the gloom; the good intentions seem impotent. Similarly in Mr. Galsworthy's novels, the finest characters suffer most, but all suffer; and there is no transfiguration of gray endurance into rosy tints of ultimate joy; at most it shimmers, pearllike, with dim lights, and the struggle ends at best in peace. In A Commentary the life of the poor appears in unrelieved gloom. The truth of the picture can never be called into question; but we cannot accept it as the whole truth. Mr. Pett Ridge, though his work stands on a lower plane, knows the London poor as intimately as Mr. Galsworthy knows them; but contrast the pictures!

It is, then, chiefly in pathetic associations that Mr. Galsworthy sees his persons. The heroic rarely finds place. In the plays, Roberts and John Antony are his most heroic figures; Jones may claim a humbler place, since he too struggles against his fate. Generally we find victims, not heroes; and correspondingly the effect is pathetic, not tragic. Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Roberts and Ruth Honeywill, even Falder, are crushed by circumstances against which they seem utterly powerless. They command our pity, but not that tenser emotion of personal admiring sympathy that we give to the stronger character, fighting in its fall. And here again, as in his abstention from psychological intensification, the explanation lies in the supreme importance for Mr. Galsworthy of the event, not the persons. Like Synge in Riders to the Sea, like Mr. Hardy in Tess and Jude and The Woodlanders, Mr. Galsworthy catches something of the power of Greek tragedy in his sense of tremendous forces at play with the individual. But these forces are for him not the inevitable decrees of the gods as in Greek tragedy, not elemental forces as in Synge's work, not the malignant ten