VI

God made the country, and man made the town.And so—man made the doctor, God the clown;God made the mountain, and the ants their hill,Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil.God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hiveUnnatural bees against their passions strive.God made the jackass and the bounding flea;I render thanks to God that man made me.Let those who recognize God's shaping powerHere but not there, in tree but not in tower,In lane and field, but not in street and square,And in man's work see nothing that is fair—Bestir their feeble fancy to the oldConception of a "country" made by God;Where birds perceive the wickedness of strifeAgainst the winds, and lead the simple lifeNestless on God's own twigs; and squirrels, freeFrom carking care, exist through FebruaryOn nuts that God has stored. Let them agreeTo leave the fields to God for just a year,And then of God's own harvest make good cheer.

God made the country, and man made the town.

And so—man made the doctor, God the clown;

God made the mountain, and the ants their hill,

Where grinding servitudes each day fulfil.

God doubtless made the flowers, while in the hive

Unnatural bees against their passions strive.

God made the jackass and the bounding flea;

I render thanks to God that man made me.

Let those who recognize God's shaping power

Here but not there, in tree but not in tower,

In lane and field, but not in street and square,

And in man's work see nothing that is fair—

Bestir their feeble fancy to the old

Conception of a "country" made by God;

Where birds perceive the wickedness of strife

Against the winds, and lead the simple life

Nestless on God's own twigs; and squirrels, free

From carking care, exist through February

On nuts that God has stored. Let them agree

To leave the fields to God for just a year,

And then of God's own harvest make good cheer.

If one were a sentimentalist, one could describe that poem as a sign of a blankly materialistic mind, with a turn for blasphemy, but if one is what one ought to be, a romantic with a sense of reality, it will appear to be a confession of faith in Godandman.

Mr. Bennett, of all the men of letters with whom I am acquainted, not even excluding Mr. Shaw, is the most generous and kindly to young people. Mr. Wells likes young people, but his interest in them is curiously impersonal. He likes youthin a lump, so to speak, rather than youth in the individual, just as he seems to love mankind more than he likes any man. But Mr. Bennett likesyou, the youth, personally. He is happier on the whole with young people than he is with their elders, and he assiduously seeks their society. He is amused by their extravagances, but not to the extent of sneering at them. He likes youth to be dandiacal, to have an air, to be arrogant, but not to be ill-bred or pretentious or third-rate. In spite of his notable kindness, he can be merciless to humbugs, and stories are told of devastating things said by him to presumptuous persons and fools. The blunt speech of "the Five Towns" is native to his tongue, and he passes judgment without mincing his words. He has a dry sort of wit which is remarkably helped by a slight hesitation in his speech, and his general conversation, without being markedly distinguished, is entertaining and agreeable in a way that is very elusive when put upon paper. It is natural, perhaps, that a man who loves youth so much as he does should have a more potent sense of the present and of the future than of the past, and this accounts for the fact that his books and

pictures are chiefly modern. I imagine that he has a greater number of books and pictures by young authors and painters than any other man of his calibre in England. He loves music, but is not "highbrow" about it, and he has a passion for dancing which threatens now to keep him jigging through ballrooms for the rest of his life. He paints quite charming water-colour pictures, and is so fond of the sea that the surest way in which any one can lose his friendship is to accompany him for a trip on his yacht and be sea-sick during it! He is a keen man of business, and he is full of contempt for the rather sloppy-minded man of letters who allows himself to be worsted in a bargain. Most men of quality are lonely men, oddly isolated in spirit, and Mr. Bennett is not an exception to the rule, but more than his compeers, I think, he is a companionable person in a small group, chiefly because of that romantic interest he has in all things, animate and inanimate. He has a wider knowledge of books than most men of letters. Most men of letters, indeed, are remarkably ignorant of books. And he has the courage, the supreme courage, to do what no other literary man I have ever met has thecourage to do: he keeps a gramophone. He likes the savor of life, and life for him includes the pictures of Corot and the gramophone and French poetry and the novels of George Moore and newspapers and motor-cars and Balzac and Bernard Shaw and the right brand of French beans. How can such a man help being romantic!

There is a legend, much beholden to Shakespeare, that learning and leanness are akin to each other, while dull wits flourish in company with obesity. The curious submission sometimes made by Shakespeare to common prejudices and ignorance, glorified by the name of legend, caused him too often to forget the obligation of the aristocrat to think for himself, and remember only to think with the mob; and the singular fact about this forgetfulness of his is that when he chose to think with the mob, he nearly always did so when the mob was in the wrong. He preferred the judgment of the street to the judgment of informed minds when he wrote "Richard the Third," and allowed himself to malign that excellent and most capable prince and monarch. Richard was one of the ablest of the kings of England, but Shakespeare, forgetting his obligations to his owngenius, portrays him as a pervert with a mania for blood. He yields to the common view in his references to fat men. Falstaff is fat and flighty and a coward, a drunkard, a braggart and a misleader of young princes, although the prototype of Sir John was himself a man of known courage. Cassius was deemed to think too much because he had a lean and hungry look. Julius Cæsar desired the society of fat men who, presumably, indulged but seldom in thought and never in any that could be called dangerous. Fat men are endowed with but one tolerable virtue: that of good nature; and if any fat men ever enters heaven, it will be because of his equable temper and in spite of his corpulence.

Mr. Chesterton is a fat man. There is a rumour in England that many Americans felt they had been defrauded of their money when they went to hear him lecture lately because he was hardly so fat as they had been led to believe! He certainly is not so bulky now, because of a serious illness, as he was when I first knew him, but in those days he was undeniably an enormous man. And in himself he is a complete refutation of the legend that fat men are dull men. Dr. Johnsonwas another fat man whose large flesh covered a large intellect. Dr. Johnson, indeed, was so able a man that, in spite of an incorrigibly lazy character, which kept him abed of mornings when he ought to have been improving the shining hour, he compiled a dictionary with little assistance which, so Frenchmen said, would have engaged the labours of forty French scholars for a long time.

These legends about men of wit and dull men need to be revised. There have been as many fat men of genius as there have been lean men of genius. There have been as many epicurean geniuses as there have been ascetic geniuses. My experience is that men of great mental energy are fonder of their food than many men with torpid minds; and some of the ablest men I know are excessively addicted to the pleasures of the table. Mr. Shaw is a fastidious feeder, with odd likes and dislikes, but no one could say that he is indifferent to what he eats. It is, I think, an ironic commentary on the legend that fat men are lacking in cleverness, that much the cleverest of those who oppose the opinions of the lean Mr. Shaw is the fat Mr. Chesterton.

Mr. Chesterton, was sent into the world by anAll-Just God for the exclusive purpose of saying the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most complimentary intention I say that Mr. Chesterton's job in the world is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to reply, "On the contrary!..." He has to restore the balance which Mr. Shaw very vigorously disturbs. Mr. Chesterton is considerably younger than Mr. Shaw, much younger than most people, on seeing him, imagine him to be. He was born in London in 1874. His book on Browning was published when he was twenty-nine, and "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" when he was thirty. The bulk of his work, and certainly the best of it, with the exception of the "Short History of England," was published before he was forty. The bulk, and certainly the best, of Mr. Shaw's work was published after he had passed his fortieth year. A critic comparing the two writers ought to remember that Mr. Shaw's work is mainly that of a mature man, whereas that of Mr. Chesterton is mainly the work of a young man.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is commonly known as a writer of paradox. He is something of a paradox himself, for he is half-Scotch, half-French, and wholly English. This paradox is not any more startling than the fact that yellow and blue, when mixed together, become green. England is half-way between Scotland and France! He handles paradox very skilfully, but there are times when he imagines he is making a paradox and is only making a pun; and there are other times when he is merely making nonsense. He states in a book called "What's Wrong With the World" that "the prime truth of woman, the universal mother" is "that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." That is singular paradox! I can understand a prime truth which declares that a thing is worth doing, even if it be done badly, but I cannot understand a prime truth which seems to make a merit of bad workmanship.

Elsewhere in the same book, he says that "submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is servility." The proper commentary on that paradox can only be made by asoldier. I can assure Mr. Chesterton that the discipline of a weak man is the nearest approach to tyranny I know, and it flies to pieces in times of great distress. Your strong man can hold thoroughly frightened men to their manhood with a word and a wave of the hand, but your weak man demoralizes them with the fretful tyranny which he calls strength. The submission of strong men to a weak man may be called discipline, but it would be better named self-assurance. But in the field itself, when authority and strength are needed, that weak man is quietly pushed into the background, and the really strong man, although he may be a private soldier, takes command. One can, of course, pick holes in many of Mr. Chesterton's paradoxes in that manner, but it is profitless to do so. Our work now is to discover what is of value in his doctrine and to describe what is unsound in it.

Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton stands for the common man against the very clever man. He believes more in the People than he believes in Particular Persons. As he himself would say, he trusts Man more than he trusts any man, a statement which reads better than it sounds.He believes in tradition, even in legend, which is the wisdom accumulated by Man, not out of his mind so much as out of his experience. He believes in the institution of private property, provided that the property is widely distributed. In other words, he believes in what is called Peasant Proprietorship. He does not believe in Progress as Mr. Wells, for example, believes in it, and he will tell you very emphatically that the common man was happier in the Middle Ages than he is to-day. There are times when it seems to me that Mr. Chesterton's "common man" is as mythical as the "average man" of the newspapers and the "economic man" of the economists; and I am very dubious about the happiness of the poor people of the Middle Ages. It would be foolish to carry one's doctrine too far, but if there is anything in this theory of Man deriving wisdom from experience, surely it is reasonable to suppose that human beings, having discovered a means of living which ensures some comfort and security to them, will not easily be deprived of it. Mr. Chesterton asks us to believe that the "common" man permitted the rich lord to rob him of his rights almostin ignorance of the fact that he was being robbed of them. It is just as probable that he was ignorant of them because he never had them.

Mr. Chesterton believes, too, in what he calls "the ancient and universal things" as against what he calls "the modern and specialist things." He has invented a theory which establishes man as the great specialist and woman as the great amateur, and he would keep woman out of the polling-booth, not because the vote is too good for her, but because it is not good enough. He demands that the woman shall stay in the home, not for the Teutonic reason that she is inferior to man and must work in a narrow area, but for the Chestertonic reason that she is capable of more varied work than man and can only find adequate range for her variety in the broad dominions of the home. "Women were not kept at home," he says, "in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept home in order to keep them broad." The effort must seem to many persons to have been a singularly unsuccessful one, but Mr. Chesterton will have none of this sophistry. "I do not even pause to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a generalservant," he asserts; discovering in her "generalness" a virtue where others would discover only a certainty of incompetence and muddle.

If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology and hygiene—I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborous, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

I have quoted that extensive passage because it is a good example of Mr. Chesterton's style and his thought. It is a mixture of soundness andunsoundness, in which the two things merge so imperceptibly that there is difficulty in distinguishing the one from the other. It is not easy to see why the stenographer, travelling to an office every morning at the same hour by the same underground railway, and typing more or less the same sort of letter for a specified number of hours before she returns every evening by the same underground railway to the home from which she set out in the morning, should be more broad-minded than the woman who stays at home performing a variety of jobs; and perhaps Mr. Chesterton is justified in his faith by the fact that the stenographer is most eager to escape from the office to the home by the way of marriage.

Nevertheless, I suspect that the home is not quite the broadening influence Mr. Chesterton declares it to be, and Mr. Chesterton himself provides me with the ground for my suspicion. To be Queen Elizabeth within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Whiteley (or Marshal Field, in America) within a certain area may be enlarging for the mind. To be Aristotle within a certain area may he enlarging for the mind. But to be Queen ElizabethandWhiteleyandAristotle withina certain area is paralyzing for the mind. The stenographer who does one thing every day, has time to think of many things: the wife and mother who does many things every day has time to think of nothing. I do not believe that the stenographer, who accepts the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, regards the drudgery of them as an unparalleled opportunity for exhibiting her versatility; and I have observed that the people who are most keen on such "modern and specialist things" as labour-saving devices, are just those women who, in Mr. Chesterton's judgment, should be most reluctant to accept them.

His praise of the "ancient and universal things" at the expense of the "modern and specialist things" leads him to say that

If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some of them might be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's cradle or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a travellingmaiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a telephone: you cannot do anything else with it.

He disparages the hot-water pipe in order to exalt the open fire. He argues that "the ancient and universal things" can be turned to many uses, but that the "modern and specialist things" are strictly limited to one purpose.

There may be much in his argument, though his examples hardly support him, but how much is not apparent. Take the case of the man in the desert who finds a coil of rope, and compare him with the man in the desert who finds a telephone. Mr. Chesterton begs us to observe how happy is the former compared with the latter, but is he one-half so happy? The absorbing passion of a man's life in a desert would be the desire to get out of the desert as quickly as possible. How far would a rope help him to realize his desire? He could not tow a boat or lasso a horse because there would not be any water on which to tow the boat or any horse to lasso. If there were a horse to lasso it would either be wild and unrideable or privateproperty. He could play at cat's cradle with the rope if it were not a rope at all—if, that is to say it were twine; and perhaps this would help him to pass away the time before he died of starvation. He could pick oakum if he wished to un-rope the rope and had never been to prison to discover what a loathsome job oakum-picking is. But he could not construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress or cord her boxes for his travelling maiden aunt, because the eloping heiress would not be eloping in a desert, and his maiden aunt would hardly be packing her trunk in the Sahara. He might be able to tie a bow. He might even be able to hang himself, though that is doubtful, for trees are not prolific in deserts. But I cannot see what comfort he would derive from either of these accomplishments.

To sum up, a man in a desert with nothing but a coil of rope between him and civilization would be in as complete a state of isolation as it would be possible for a man to imagine. How different would be the case of the man in a desert with the despised "modern and specialist" telephone! For he, finding a telephone, would instantly be able to communicate with other people and todirect them to his rescue. If he were anxious to hang himself, he could more effectively do so in the neighbourhood of a telephone than in the neighbourhood of a coil of rope, for where there are telephones there are generally telegraph-poles!

Even in the case of the open fire and hot-water pipe, as much can be said for the "modern and specialist thing" as can be said for the "ancient and universal thing," and in some instances, more can be said for it. We get a cheerful glow from an open fire that certainly is not to be got from a hot-water pipe; but Mr. Chesterton must have noticed on many occasions that whereas one gets tolerably toasted on one side by an open fire, the other side is usually left cold. Thus a man, on a wintry night, sitting before the fire, may be too warm in front, and half-frozen behind. But a hot-water pipe creates an equable temperature in a room and leaves a man warm on all sides.

He is a nationalist and therefore opposed to imperialism. His belief in peasant proprietorship flows naturally from his belief innationalism. He defends peasant proprietorship in "Irish Impressions" because he believes that a country controlled by peasants will survive long after more majestically-governed nations have declined and fallen:—

I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know that if any honest resistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ireland will be the most honest and probably the most important.... It is where property is well distributed that it will be well defended. The post of honour will be with those who fight in very truth for their own land.

Now, here we are on very debateable ground, as debateable as his statement that "honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters," which is surely an obscure rendering of the entirely commercial statement that "honesty is the best policy." Honour is not honour when a man uses it merely because it is profitable to him, and I cannot see much virtue in him who fights for his land simply because he owns it. Honour is admirable when it brings not profit but loss to the man who wears it. Virtue is in the man who fights for his country though he does not own an inch of it.And here I come to my objection to Mr. Chesterton's beloved peasant proprietorship, the cause of my dismay at the thought that my own country of Ireland may soon be controlled by small farmers.

It is true that a peasant will fight desperately for his own piece of land, but he manifests a sturdy reluctance to fight for another man's land; and I cannot understand why Mr. Chesterton regards his determination to hold on to his property as more "honest," or more "honourable" than the determination of a Victory bondholder to get the last cent of interest out of the taxpayers. Peasants, no less than other men, in fact more than other men, have itching palms, and it is sheer sentimentalism to describe as "honest" or "honourable" behaviour in them which is denounced as dishonest and dishonourable in a stockbroker. It is true that Lenin's schemes collapsed completely before the resistance of the Russian peasants, and that his plans for the nationization of everything failed to include the principal thing of all, namely, the land; but Mr. Chesterton will hardly maintain that the Russian peasants had disinterested motives in offering this resistance to Lenin. He may, indeed, insist that their motives were entirelyinterested and base his case for the Distributive State, as Mr. Belloc named it, on that very interest. But a nation should be something more than a crowd of peasants digging in the earth for their personal profit, and when Mr. Chesterton commends his peasant proprietors to me, I ask not for the signs of their interested behaviour, but for the signs of their disinterested behaviour. When he tells me that the peasant will fight for his own land, I ask him whether the peasant will fight for his neighbour's land? When he tells me that the Irish peasant will resist the attempts of the Bolshevist to communalize his land, I ask him whether the Irish peasant is equally ready to defend the French peasant from Russian aggression? Mr. Chesterton declares that France had claims on the gratitude of Ireland. Did the Irish peasant farmer remember those claims on his gratitude? Or did he find it more convenient and profitable to ejaculate, "Yah, dirty atheist, go and fight your own battles!" In deriding the idea of empire, Mr. Chesterton says in this book of "Irish Impressions" that "the British combination" is "more lax and liable to schism" than a combination of peasants. I do not believe there is any truth in thisstatement, particularly when I remember that "the British combination" held together for five years in circumstances that might have been expected to shake it to pieces. Let me give you an example, out of my experience during the War, of the way in which the Imperial idea rallies men to its support to their own loss. While I was being trained to be an officer, I shared a hut with twenty-five other men. Between us, we represented every part of the British Empire. The twenty-six men in that hut included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and two Irishmen (one of whom was an Orangeman, and the other, myself, a Home Ruler). In addition to these, there were two Australians, a man from New Zealand, two men from Canada, two from South Africa and a couple of men from South America, one a Spaniard and the other the son of English parents. Many of these men had travelled for thousands of miles at their own expense in order to join the British Army. They were volunteers. I would like to see the community of peasants that would travel ten yards to defend anything but their own personal property, except under compulsion.

When I cited this case to Mr. Chesterton sometime ago, in controversy with him, he replied with characteristic amiability, that Serbia was a community of peasants, and that Serbia had fought in the War. When I asked whether Serbia would have fought for Montenegro, he replied that she had done more than that, she had fought for "the wholly invisible bond of all Christendom." But Serbia did nothing of the sort. She fought for herself because she was invaded. That was a perfectly proper thing to do, but there is no comparison between it and the behaviour of men responding at their own cost to the Imperial idea, although many hundreds of miles away from the place of argument and under no compulsion to go to it.

The truth about a peasant civilization is that it is a mean civilization, in which mean virtues compete with mean vices, and the small and local thing is esteemed above the big and worldwide thing. There are many defects in empires, even in one so loosely-bound as the British Empire, but although those who control an empire are often guilty of cruel deeds, there is at least this to be said in their defense, that they honestly believe themselves to be possessed of greater wisdom than those whom theyoppress, and do desire in their stupid fashion to govern them for their good.

On the whole, freedom may be defined as the right to choose; but that definition must obviously be subject to limitations. There is a sort of wild and woolly democrat who believes in the right of uninstructed persons to choose wrong. It is not a right in which I believe. Mr. Chesterton thinks, not without justification, that the common man can choose in a right manner. If his creed were confined to that clause we could accept it with heartiness, but there are times when he seems to think that the common man chooses aright because he is a common man, and he leaves us with the impression that he can never quite forgive Magna Charta because it was won by peers, and not by peasants. He seems not to realize that if Magna Charta had depended upon peasants, it would never have been won.

But he helps us to keep a balance. His service to us is that when we are inclined to run franticallyafter the superman, he reminds us of the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen, reminding them that even a superman can be a fool.

There are times indeed, when his faith in the common man undergoes a sea-change, and he utters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. L. Mencken, who cannot abide the common mind. In one of his essays, Mr. Chesterton says, "I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper." So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether the Early Christians would have approved his preference. They, who were ready to pronounce all flesh to be grass, would not have found anything incompatible with their faith in a gentleman who regarded himself as a grasshopper. They would certainly have considered his rival in misapprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. Chesterton would fail to find pleasure in the company of a man who believed himself to be that interesting but monotonous insect, how much less pleasure would he derive from sharing hisapartments with a man who believed not only himself, but all men, to be worms?

He is personally the most kindly and agreeable of men, in whom the one virtue commonly ascribed to fat men, that of good nature, is most highly developed. His anger is almost completely impersonal. His pardon is on the heels of his condemnation. The sins of jealousy and hatred are unknown to him, and he seems to be without the power of resenting spiteful things done to himself. He said to me on one occasion, "Arnold Bennett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, but puzzled by the fact that any man should call another one an offensive name. We are all children of the one God, in his belief, even if some of us are Jews, and in some mystical manner he contrives, in his anger, to discriminate between the human being and the thing which the human being does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or an international financier or a Prohibitionist, he will do so entirely without prejudice to that person's right to be called a child of God. It is a tribute to the charm of his character and the equability of his temper that his stoutest admirers arethose who most vigorously combat his opinions, and that most of his friends are men who do not share any of his views, except perhaps the only view that matters, the view that an ill deed must be exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quixote in the body of Sancho Panza.

It is sometimes said that an artist never intrudes his personality into his work and that the great writers of the world have kept themselves so closely to themselves that their readers have never been able to discover anything of their faith or partialities. This is not only untrue, but is also absurd, for how can any man hope to exclude himself from his creations, since without him the creations would not be? There never was a book of any sort which did not in some fashion reveal the nature of its author to discerning readers, and I will personally undertake to give a fairly accurate account of the general character of any author after an attentive reading of all his writings. There are authors, such as Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, who do not make any pretence of excluding themselves from the notice of their readers: they deliberately force themselves into their books; and the habit has become so much a part oftheir nature that they sometimes do it unconsciously. One may say of them, perhaps, that we learn chiefly from their writings what their opinions are, but learn nothing of their characters. But while it is true that we do receive much information about their opinions, it is true also, I think, that they unmistakably reveal themselves, something of the intimate parts of them, to those who closely consider their books. Fielding formally held up the course of his stories in order that he might state his views to his readers, and Dickens and Thackeray followed his example; but all three of them revealed more than their beliefs to their readers—they revealed themselves. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are excellent examples of what may be described as the Direct Revealers—writers who nakedly manifest their opinions and, more or less nakedly, their personalities in their books. The Indirect Revealers are best exemplified in two poets, Shakespeare and John Millington Synge, and one novelist and dramatist, Mr. John Galsworthy. We have very little documentary evidence of Shakespeare's existence, and it is impossible, therefore, to write his biography with the accuracy of detail with which oneis able to record the events of, say, Roosevelt's career; but there is a clear and unmistakable account of his hopes and fears and beliefs and disbeliefs, a most faithful portrait of his character, contained in his poems and plays. How can any one fail to discover behind his work the figure of a grave, fastidious, disdainful and distrustful and solitary man whose spiritual solitude was concealed under an appearance of gregariousness and cheerful living that made him a good companion on most occasions without being excessively popular. Ben Jonson, despite his quarrelsome character, was probably more deeply loved by his contemporaries than Shakespeare was, because Shakespeare had more of reserve and spiritual isolation than Ben had, and was less willing to put faith in the virtue of the crowd; and I imagine that had one interrogated any of Shakespeare's friends, they would have said of him, "Oh, yes, I like William Shakespeare very much! Talks well! He's a good chap, but a little odd ... queer ... at times. It isn't easy to make friends with him. He always keeps us at our distance—not deliberately, of course, but in some vague way. He understands us all right, and he takes part in ourrevels, but he never completely descends to our level. Now, old Ben ... he's a good, hearty chap! He is so comradely that we frequently forget he is Ben Jonson and think of him as just one of ourselves. Shakespeare's friendly enough, but we never forget that he is Shakespeare. Sometimes, quite unintentionally, he makes us feel a little common!..."

The best biography of John Synge that I have read—and l have read all of them—is contained in his plays and poems. It is impossible to rise from his books without an impression of intense loneliness and unachievable desires, of a man eager to be the hero of romantic exploits, but totally unable to stand up to life and make himself a hero because of some spiritual ineffectiveness, some lack of assertion which results in fumbling and self-distrust; and one goes from the plays and poems to the biographies and is not surprised at reading of his lonely life. How often the word "lonesome" occurs in his writings, and how deeply he insists on the terrors of solitude! Pegeen Mike in the "The Playboy of the Western World" reproves her father for going "over the sands to Kate Cassidy's wake" and leaving her alone in the shebeen:

If I am a queer daughter, it's a queer father'd be leaving me lonesome these twelve hours of dark, and I piling the turf with the dogs barking, and the calves mooing, and my own teeth rattling with the fear.

I imagine that there is some deep personal feeling of Synge's in the speech he puts into the mouth of Christy Mahon in the second act of the same play:

Christy: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again, and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be looking for the Lord?Pegeen: What call have you to be lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?Christy: It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.Pegeen: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes on to this hour to-day.Christy: What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in the world?

Christy: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again, and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be looking for the Lord?

Pegeen: What call have you to be lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?

Christy: It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.

Pegeen: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes on to this hour to-day.

Christy: What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in the world?

The scene of all his plays is laid in a lonely place: the last cottage at the head of a long glen in Wicklow; a small and remote island off the west coast of Ireland; a distant hamlet in a mountainous district. His people are possessed of a perpetual fear of death and old age, and lead uneventful lives, having minds which continually crave for the performance of splendid and unusual deeds. Few men have put their longings and disappointments so boldly and plainly into their work as John Synge put his. I do not suggest that an author may be identified with every word and action of his creatures—a manifestly absurd suggestion—but I do suggest that it is possible for an intelligent reader to obtain a very clear and well-defined impression of the character and beliefs of an author from a careful study of the whole body of his work.

Mr. John Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern men of letters, but his sensitiveness is of a peculiar nature, for it is almost totally impersonal. One thinks of Dostoievsky eternally pitying himself in the belief that he was pitying humanity and particularly that part of it which is Russian; or of Maxim Gorki, as shown in his vivid and extraordinary study of Leo Tolstoi,[4]preoccupied with himself to the extent of imagining that Tolstoi, the aristocrat, related salacious stories in common speech to him, the peasant, because he imagined that Gorki, being of vulgar origin, could not appreciate refined conversation:

I remember my first meeting with him and his talk about "Varienka Oliessova" and "Twenty-six and One." From the ordinary point of view, what he said was a string of indecent words. I was perplexed by it and even offended. I thought that he considered me incapable of understanding any other kind of language. I understand now: it was silly to have felt offended.

One thinks, too, of Mr. Shaw's lively interest in himself, and of Mr. Wells's eagerness to remoldthe world nearer to his heart's desire. And remembering these men, intensely individual and not reluctant to speak of themselves, one is startled to discover how destitute of egotism Mr. Galsworthy seems to be. It may even be argued that his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry, that it is impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is. He has written more than a dozen novels and at least a dozen plays, but there is not one line in any of them to denote that he takes any interest whatever in John Galsworthy. The most obvious characteristic of his work is an immense and, sometimes, indiscriminating pity, but I imagine that the only creature on whom he has no pity is himself. Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence which was characteristic of the English people—I am now using the word "English" in the strict sense—in pre-war times, but is hardly characteristic of them now, is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy. And yet there are few among contemporary writers who reveal so much of themselves as he does. Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells,who constantly expose their beliefs to their readers, do in the long run tell so much about their characters as Mr. Galsworthy, who never makes a conscious revelation of himself and is probably quite unaware that he had made any revelations at all. How often have we observed in our own relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy's handsome, sensitive face and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.

I remember, more than ten years ago, reading a notice of the first performance of "Justice" in an English Sunday newspaper in which the critic, who must have been terribly drunk when he wrote it, attacked the play, making nine misstatements of fact about it in as many lines. Those were the days when I took the field on the slightest provocation. An insult offered to a man of letters for whom I had respect was an insult offered to me, and I made much trouble for myself by smackingfaces with great ferocity for offences, not against me, but against my friends and my betters. I wrote a letter to that critic which created some havoc in his sodden brain, and I then posted a copy of it to Mr. Galsworthy. He thanked me very civilly for what I had done, and added that he never replied to criticism of any sort! I was astounded by his statement and a little dashed. My faith in those days was, crudely, two eyes for one tooth! Those who struck at me might expect two blows in return. Like Mrs. Ferguson, in my play, "John Ferguson," I said to myself, "If anyone was to hurt me, I'd do my best to hurt them back and hurt them harder nor they hurt me!" I could not bring myself into line with the meekness of Mr. Galsworthy until I discovered in it a form of supreme arrogance!... Now that I know him and his work better, I realize that I was wrong in my estimation of him both as excessively meek and excessively arrogant. His rule never to reply to criticism, however unfair, is a sign, not of humility or pride, but of complete indifference to himself. I can believe in him becoming furious with one who belittles a dog, but I cannotbelieve in him displaying any feeling over one who belittles John Galsworthy.

But when I look at his tightened lips, I feel certain that they are drawn closely together, not to prevent himself from forgetting his indifference to himself, but to prevent him from pouring out his anger at wrong and cruelty suffered by other people. His hatred of injustice possesses him like a fury, so that I expect to find his hands always clenched. There are times, indeed, when he allows his feeling for others, human and animal, to destroy his sense of proportion, and he will sometimes imagine that people or beasts are suffering a great deal more of pain than they really are, even that they are suffering when in fact they are not suffering at all. This is the complaint most commonly made of him by his critics, that he sometimes exaggerates the extent to which people and, particularly, animals suffer. When I was a child, I remember that I often read in sentimental Sunday-school books of slum children who never smiled and had never seen grass. I suppose that fundamentally I have a sceptical mind, for even then I found myself doubting whether therewere any children in the world who had never seen grass. Grass is so persistent!... I knew that a street had only to be free of traffic for a short while and little blades of grass would begin to push up from between the cobbles!... It might be that slum children never smiled—though I was dubious of that—but all of them must have seen some grass sometime. Then I grew up and left Ulster and went to England, and for two or three years I lived on the confines of a slum in South London, where I discovered that my sentimental authors were sentimental liars, that poor people do not live lives of incessant misery, that they smile and laugh as often as, if not more frequently than, rich people, and are fully as happy as any one else. Happiness and unhappiness are conditions of the spirit, and provided a man has sufficient food to eat and a decent shelter and warm clothes, it matters very little whether he be rich or poor. Mr. Galsworthy is not always as sensible of this as he might be. Like many idealists he attaches more importance to material things than many materialists do. He lets himself be too easily persuaded that a thing is wrong because it looks wrong. If he had walked into the Valley ofElah on that morning when the fair and ruddy youth, David, encountered Goliath, he would certainly have run to David's side. What combat could have seemed more unequal than that? David was young and slender and of ordinary stature. He wore no armor and his weapons were a sling and five pebbles casually picked from a brook. Goliath was five cubits and a span high, and his huge body was covered with heavy armor. There was a helmet of brass on his head, and there were greaves of brass on his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. His weapons were terrible: the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam, and his spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron. A man walked in front of him carrying a shield!... No wonder that Goliath mocked at David and threatened to pick the flesh from his bones and give it to the birds. He probably felt that one breath from his mouth would blow David clean out of the valley. Mr. Galsworthy, had he been present on that occasion, would have said to himself, "Poor David, young and slight and ill-armed, has no chance whatever against this great hulking, uncircumcized Philistine!..." The combat certainly was anunequal one, but the advantage lay, not with Goliath, but with David. The giant had the outward show of strength, but David had the Power of God in his right arm, and before that Power Goliath was but a boneless beast. Mr. Galsworthy makes Stephen More in his play "The Mob," revile the crowd in these terms:

You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women; howls down free speech. This to-day, and that to-morrow. Brain—you have none! Spirit—not the ghost of it! If you're not meanness, there's no such thing. If you're not cowardice, there is no cowardice.

Neither Stephen More nor Mr. Galsworthy appears to know that these characteristics of the mob are the characteristics of weak things. Strong men do not pelt the weak or kick women, nor do they prevent free speech. It is weak men and timid men and ignorant, frightened men—politicians and officials and guttersnipes and sinners—who do these things, because they have neither the courage nor the strength nor the intelligence to do otherwise. The mob-instinct of unreasoning chivalry, the natural impulse to take the part of "the little 'un," constitutes a very serious danger to Mr.Galsworthy's work: he is becoming increasingly partisan in his opinions and sympathies, with the result that his sentiment is in danger of degenerating into sentimentalism, and he, so commonly considered impartial, is likely to end in a state of hopeless and wrong-headed bias. He is beginning to believe that a weak man is right because he is weak. He is forgetting the truth enunciated, perhaps excessively, by Dr. Stockmann in "An Enemy of the People" that "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands absolutely alone." Or if he has not forgotten it, he is in danger of believing that a minority is always in the right because it is a minority: a belief which is as fallacious as that which Mr. G. K. Chesterton sometimes seems to hold, that a majority is always in the right because it is a majority. The plain and platitudinous truth is that only those are in the right who are in the right, whether they be in a majority or in a minority. Weakness, although it may endow a man with cunning, does not endow him with moral authority. Mr. Galsworthy at times lets his pity for weakness lead him into seeming to regard it as a sign of infallible judgment.

Mr. Galsworthy can create people and he can write natural dialogue. "The Silver Box" is a testimony of his power to do so. But in his later plays he has not always allowed his creatures to behave in a creditable fashion, nor has he always written dialogue that exactly fits their tongues. One suspects, too, that he is losing his sense of proportion, that he is not so capable now as he was earlier in his career of distinguishing between things which are important and things which are not. He has developed an interest in trivial questions of sex and has become so absorbed in dilemmas of colliding characters that he has lost sight of the nature of his characters. He has been called a Determinist because he shows his people as the creature of circumstances, but in his later work, particularly in his play "The Fugitive," his Determinism has become wilful: he seems to have made up his mind that his characters shall become the victims of circumstances in defiance of facts and the natures with which he has created them. He deliberately ties their hands behind their backs and then exclaims: "These are thevictims of adverse circumstances!" And indeed they are, but the circumstances have been artificially created by Mr. Galsworthy and not by any force that governs the universe. He is so eager to bring Clare Dedmond, in "The Fugitive," to her death in a restaurant frequented by prostitutes that he totally neglects to consider the fact that with the nature he gives her she is the last person on earth likely to end that way.

It is not in ideas that Mr. Galsworthy fails, so far as his later work is concerned—it is in execution. The idea of "The Fugitive" is a notable one. The play, which in its faults is significant of all Mr. Galsworthy's later plays, deals with the tragic failure of a sensitive woman to adjust her life to that of a dull, unimaginative man in whom, although the conventions and traditions of his class have schooled him into a certain decency of form, there is a very large measure of coarseness. The collision is between the finely-perceptive and the totally-imperceptive, and the theme is similar, in one respect, to that of "The Doll's House," and in another to that of "The Shadow of the Glen." But the treatment of it is very inferior to the treatment of it by Ibsen and Synge. Ibsen plainly showedhow impossible it was for Nora to continue to live with her husband after she had suffered her disillusionment. He showed with equal clarity how natural it was that she should marry and love her husband, and yet in the end, turn away from him. Mr. Galsworthy takes Clare Dedmond beyond the stage to which Ibsen took Nora. Ibsen was content to end his play with Nora's exit from her husband's home: he did not follow her from it nor show what became of her thereafter. Mr. Galsworthy is concerned less with the act of separation and more with the consequences of it. He is not so interested in her flight from her husband as he is in what happens to her after she has flown from him. He has taken a longer stretch of Clare's life than Ibsen took of Nora's, but he has contrived to make it smaller than Nora's. One derives an extraordinary sense of completeness and space from "The Doll's House," but does not derive a similar sense from "The Fugitive." Ibsen gives one a sense of familiarity with his people, but Mr. Galsworthy hardly makes one more familiar with Clare Dedmond and her husband than a reader of a newspaper is with the principal parties to a divorce suit.

Clare Dedmond, like Nora Burke in Synge's "The Shadow of the Glen," is suffering from starved emotions, but Synge in his one-act play has created the atmosphere of starved emotions far more successfully than Mr. Galsworthy has done in his four acts. The antagonism between Nora and Daniel Burke is instantly understood by the reader, who, however, cannot immediately understand why it is that Clare and George Dedmond do not "get on" together. The reader knows why Nora married Daniel. "And how would I live and I an old woman if I hadn't a bit of a farm with cows on it and sheep on the blackhills?" The sense of desolation in this woman's life is so powerfully expressed that the reader of the play does not ask questions. He does not stop to inquire why Nora married her husband: heknowswhy she married him, and this knowledge is derived, not from the author's assertions, but from the woman's behaviour. A sense of desolation is not created when the author says that there is desolation, nor is it created when a character says: "I am miserable!" It is created when the speech and behaviour of the characters are such as one hears and sees when people are unhappy. It would be absurd for awriter to make a character say: "I have a very kindly disposition," and then show him in the normal habit of beating his wife, kicking his grandmother, and ill-treating animals ... unless he were trying to be funny or were portraying a madman. There must be consistency between character and conduct, and the measure of a writer's artistry is the degree to which he succeeds in reconciling the one with the other.

It is when Mr. Galsworthy's later work is tested in this manner that one realizes how lamentably he has failed to create the illusion of life. One goes through the pages of "The Fugitive" making notes of interrogation! One does not ask: "Why did Ibsen's Nora marry her husband?" "Why did Synge's Nora marry her husband?" because one knows the answer to these questions from the beginning of the plays, and it is not necessary to ask them. But why did Clare Dedmond marry her husband? Because she loved him? Because she wished to be married and no one else had asked her? For money? To escape from her parents? It is impossible to say. Most of the faults which I find in Mr. Galsworthy's work are to be found inthis play and so I propose to examine it here in detail.

The story of "The Fugitive" is summarily this:—

Clare Huntington, the daughter of a poor parson, is married to George Dedmond, a man of wealth and social position. When the play begins these two have reached that point in their marital relationship when their unhappiness is plain to their acquaintances. The husband, irritated and puzzled, is eager to make a compromise which will not involve legal separation and "talk."

Clare(softly). I don't give satisfaction. Please give me notice.George.Pish!Clare.Five years, and four of them like this! I'm sure we've served our time. Don't you really think we might get on better together—if I went away.George.I've told you I won't stand a separation for no real reason, and have your name bandied about all over London. I have some primitive sense of honour.

Clare(softly). I don't give satisfaction. Please give me notice.

George.Pish!

Clare.Five years, and four of them like this! I'm sure we've served our time. Don't you really think we might get on better together—if I went away.

George.I've told you I won't stand a separation for no real reason, and have your name bandied about all over London. I have some primitive sense of honour.

While travelling abroad the Dedmonds make the acquaintance of a journalist named Kenneth Malise who is employed on a weekly review. He and Clare become very friendly with each other,but George, who declares that Malise is a bounder, does not share the friendship. Malise knows that Clare is unhappy in her marriage and he incites her to "spread your wings." He does not appear to have thought of what is to become of her when she spreads her wings, nor does he manifest any concern about her ability to remain in flight. His attitude towards her may roughly be said to be: "It doesn't matter what happens to you so long as you run away from your husband!" Clare eventually leaves her husband, and in the second act she goes to Malise's rooms to ask for his advice. She has taken his advice to spread her wings. What is she to do?

Mr. Malise very clearly does not know what she is to do. While he and she are debating about her future his rooms are invaded by Dedmond's parents, his solicitor, and, subsequently, by Dedmond himself. They endeavour to persuade Clare to return to her husband, which she refuses to do, and there is a scene in which George Dedmond, having offered to take Clare back to his home, goes away threatening to divorce her and cite Malise as co-respondent. After this scene Clare, in obedience to her queer sense ofhonour, which impels her to make hateful returns for favours received, offers herself in physical submission to Malise, without, however, being able to conceal the fact that such submission is loathsome to her. It is necessary, in studying this play, to take considerable notice of Clare's attitude towards physical relationships. Sexual submission is repulsive to her, not only in relation to her husband, whom she dislikes, but also in relation to Malise, for whom she has so much liking that eventually she falls in love with him. At the moment at which the offer is first made, however, she is not in love with Malise: she offers herself to him because she feels that, having brought trouble upon him, she ought to make reparation for her conduct!

Clare.If I must bring you harm—let me pay you back. I can't bear it otherwise! Make some use of me, if you don't mind!Malise.My God!She puts her face up to be kissed, shutting her eyes.Malise.You poor——He clasps and kisses her; then, drawing back, looks in her face. She has not moved; her eyes are still closed. But she is shivering;her lips are tightly pressed together, her hands twitching.Malise(very quietly). No, no! This is not the house of a "gentleman."Clare(letting her head fall, and almost in a whisper). I'm sorry—Malise.I understand.Clare.I don't feel. And without—I can't, can't.Malise(bitterly). Quite right. You've had enough of that.

Clare.If I must bring you harm—let me pay you back. I can't bear it otherwise! Make some use of me, if you don't mind!

Malise.My God!

She puts her face up to be kissed, shutting her eyes.

Malise.You poor——

He clasps and kisses her; then, drawing back, looks in her face. She has not moved; her eyes are still closed. But she is shivering;her lips are tightly pressed together, her hands twitching.

Malise(very quietly). No, no! This is not the house of a "gentleman."

Clare(letting her head fall, and almost in a whisper). I'm sorry—

Malise.I understand.

Clare.I don't feel. And without—I can't, can't.

Malise(bitterly). Quite right. You've had enough of that.

That speech—"I don't feel. And without—I can't, can't"—is the key-speech of Clare Dedmond's nature, and, in view of the end of the play, must be remembered.

Malise, recognizing that Clare cannot happily be his mistress otherwise than in name, will not accept her offer of physical submission merely as a return for what he may have to bear in her behalf, and so she leaves his flat. She obtains employment as a shop-assistant, and is not seen again, by her family or by Malise, for three months. Then, after she has encountered a relative, she bolts in a panic from the shop and returns to Malise's flat. She proposes to do typewriting and asks him to find employment for her. He gives her some of his own MSS. to type, and while they arediscussing her prospects of employment she reveals the fact that she now loves him.

Malise.Can you typewrite where you are?Clare.I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm changing—to be safe. (She takes a luggage ticket from her glove). I took my things to Charing Cross—only a bag and one trunk. (Then, with that queer expression on her face which prefaces her desperations.) You don't want me now, I suppose?Malise.What?Clare(hardly above a whisper). Because—if you still wanted me—I do—now.Malise(staring hard into her face that is quivering and smiling). You mean it? Youdo? You care?Clare.I've thought of you—so much. But only—if you're sure.He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes.

Malise.Can you typewrite where you are?

Clare.I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm changing—to be safe. (She takes a luggage ticket from her glove). I took my things to Charing Cross—only a bag and one trunk. (Then, with that queer expression on her face which prefaces her desperations.) You don't want me now, I suppose?

Malise.What?

Clare(hardly above a whisper). Because—if you still wanted me—I do—now.

Malise(staring hard into her face that is quivering and smiling). You mean it? Youdo? You care?

Clare.I've thought of you—so much. But only—if you're sure.

He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes.

That love declaration is singularly unconvincing, more so to the reader of the play than to the witness of it. It is not unlikely that Clare's liking for Malise increased during the three months of their separation, particularly as she regarded him as a benefactor to whom she had brought trouble, but it seems to me to be improbable that she would declare her love so casually. Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions make the puzzle more involved.If Clare were in love with Malise to the extent of overcoming her hatred of physical contacts, she would hardly have "that queer expression on her face which prefaces her desperations." When a man or woman is desperate he or she is hopeless or almost hopeless, and if Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions are to be taken seriously then they mean that Clare was willing to become the mistress of Malise for much the same reason that a rat will fight in a corner. But if her words mean what they would seem to mean, surely, given her character and remembering what she has endured, her surrender to Malise will not be accompanied by any signs of desperation at all, but in sheer reaction, if nothing else, by every sign of jubilation and relief.

The attitude of Malise towards Clare does not appear to have undergone any change at all; he is not any more in love with her in the third act than he was in the first act, when, indeed, his love had a dubious aspect. There is no warmth in the man, no glow. He is cold, not with the hard, sharp, tingling cold of ice, but with the flabby chill of a dead fish. When George Dedmond institutes divorce proceedings, citing Malise asco-respondent, the fellow goes to pieces, and whines and bleats to his charwoman because the proprietors of the review on which he is employed propose to dismiss him. They have some scruples against writers who become involved in scandals. The charwoman informs Clare of Malise's misery, and she, knowing that her husband will abandon the suit if she leaves Malise, goes quietly from his flat. Her next appearance is in a restaurant, largely patronized by prostitutes. One does not know what has happened to her in the meantime, but it is plain that she must have suffered acutely, for this delicately bred woman, sensitive to the point of morbidity about sexual relationships, has decided to become a prostitute! We see her entering "The Gascony" for the first time when the fourth act begins. A young man, ordinary, decent, and uncommonly lustful, makes overtures to her, treating her with kindliness when he discovers that he is her first customer. His kindliness helps to reconcile her to her position, and she prepares to leave the restaurant with him. While he is paying the bill two coarse men leer at her, and one of them accosts her, making an appointment for the following evening. As shewatches his coarse face, inflamed with lust, she realises the horror of the life she is about to lead, and suddenly makes a decision—she takes a bottle of poison from her dress, pours its contents into a wine-glass, and drinks it. She dies while some sportsmen in an adjoining room play "the last notes of an old song 'This Day a Stag Must Die' on a horn." And that is the end of the play.

It seems to me to be incredible that Clare Dedmond should have gone to that restaurant to sell herself to any casual purchaser. It seems to me, given her nature, incredible that she should even have thought of such a way of life or that, having thought of it, she should not instantly poison herself rather than endure it. Mr. Galsworthy insists throughout the play on her exceptional sensitiveness about sex-relationships. I think that psychologically he has over-stated this sensitiveness, but, assuming that he has not done so, is it conceivable that a woman who shivers and twitches her hands when she is kissed by a man whom she likes will consent to put on fine clothes and go to a notorious restaurant and sit at a table while men inspect her?... (I leave out of consideration such questions as: "Where did she obtain the fine clothes?" "Howdid she acquire her knowledge of 'The Gascony'?") If she were prepared to endure that last of all defilements, why did she run away from her husband? If she were capable of selling her embraces, why did she shiver and twitch when Malise kissed her? George Dedmond was not a "bad" man. He did not ill-treat her nor was he faithless to her. He insisted, indeed, on sexual submissions, but one has difficulty in believing that her horror of these, "unless I feel," was very strong since she was willing to suffer the casual amours of "The Gascony." There would have been something pitiable in her if, after leaving Malise, she had returned to George. There would have been something tragical in her if, reluctant to return to George, she had killed herself when she found that she could not maintain herself in decency. But there is nothing either pitiable or tragical in the end devised for her by Mr. Galsworthy. It is an arranged and schemed destiny that overwhelms Clare Dedmond, arranged and schemed not by Circumstance but by Mr. Galsworthy, and having no relation whatever to the nature of the woman. Mr. Galsworthy wanted to poison her in "The Gascony," and so he thrusther into the restaurant in plain disregard of her character and of common facts.

There is a phrase in the play which is intended to illuminate Clare's nature. "You're too fine," Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're not fine enough to endure things." How can one be too fine to endure a thing and yet not fine enough to endure it? And, having begun to question in that fashion, one goes on again to wonder why she married her husband. "Five years" (of marriage), she says to her husband, "and four of them like this!" Here is no case of slow transformation of love into dislike or of instant disillusionment. Clare does not suddenly discover or slowly discover that George is not the sort of man she had imagined him to be, for he remains throughout the play exactly the sort of man he was when she was wooed and married by him. He did not become prosaic, unimaginative, and coarse after marriage: he was always like that; and Clare, so sensitive as she was, must have been jarred by him as much before marriage as she was a year after marriage. There is no suggestion in the play that she married for money. Had she done so, surely she would, when we remember the depths to which she wassubsequently prepared to descend, have borne his dullness and coarseness, not gladly, perhaps, but with fortitude?

The processes of attraction and repulsion are so complicated that it is difficult to say where one begins and the other ends, but this difficulty is hardly to be experienced in cases where the personalities are so marked and divergent as were the personalities of Clare and George Dedmond. If one were to take a man like Squire Western in "Tom Jones" and marry him to Mélisande in "Pelléas et Mélisande," one could prophesy with some certainty what would be the result of such a marriage. It would be disastrous. Left to the ordinary processes of nature, however, such a marriage would not take place at all.

But the difficulty of fathoming Clare's relationships does not end with her husband. It is equally difficult to understand her attitude towards Malise. What attracted her to this extraordinarily ill-bred man who sneers openly at her relatives and friends, mocking and insulting them to her and to their faces? The Dedmonds, parents and son, are dense, but they are decent. They live by rule because they cannot live by any othermeans. It is not their fault that they cannot understand Clare's point of view, any more than it is the fault of a blind man that he falls over an obstacle which he cannot see. Malise regards them as malignant people, deliberately imprisoning an aspiring woman. His vision of them is as narrow as is theirs of him, and, since he has not got their breeding or kindliness, his conduct is caddish where theirs is merely stupid. There is no magnitude or charity in this man. He spends his days and nights in writing petulant screeds in the style of Thomas Carlyle: windy stuff, blowing out of a noisome mind; and when he has induced one helpless, incompetent woman to follow his creed he fails her completely.

The last sentences of the play show that Mr. Galsworthy had set his mind on Clare's death in disregard of the probabilities. Clare, having swallowed the poison, is lying back in her chair, presumably dead.

The Young Man has covered his eyes with his hands; Arnaud is crossing himself fervently; the Languid Lord stands gazing with one of the dropped gardenias twisted in his fingers; and the woman bending over Clare, kisses her forehead.

That is a piece of theatricality. It has no relationship to real things. Those people, in life, would not have stood about in sentimental attitudes watching a woman die of poison. The young man would have flown for a doctor; the waiter would have rushed off for an emetic; the languid lord would have lost his languid airs in his desire to get away from the restaurant in fear lest he might be summoned as a witness at the inquest; and the woman would promptly have had hysterics.

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