The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy

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STUDIES AND ESSAYS, Complete

By John Galsworthy

CONTENTS:

CONCERNING LIFE, Part 1.
INN OF TRANQUILITY
MAGPIE OVER THE HILL
SHEEP-SHEARING
EVOLUTION
RIDING IN THE MIST
THE PROCESSION
A CHRISTIAN
WIND IN THE ROCKS
MY DISTANT RELATIVE
THE BLACK GODMOTHER

CONCERNING LIFE, Part 2.
QUALITY
THE GRAND JURY
GONE
THRESHING
THAT OLD-TIME PLACE
ROMANCE--THREE GLEAMS
MEMORIES
FELICITY

CONCERNING LETTERS
A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY
SOME PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA
MEDITATION ON FINALITY
WANTED--SCHOOLING
ON OUR DISLIKE OF THINGS AS THEY ARE
THE WINDLESTRAW

CENSORSHIP AND ART
ABOUT CENSORSHIP
VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART

"Je vous dirai que l'exces est toujours un mal."
--ANATOLE FRANCE

CONCERNING LIFE

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
INN OF TRANQUILITY
MAGPIE OVER THE HILL
SHEEP-SHEARING
EVOLUTION
RIDING IN THE MIST
THE PROCESSION
A CHRISTIAN
WIND IN THE ROCKS
MY DISTANT RELATIVE
THE BLACK GODMOTHER

THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY

Under a burning blue sky, among the pine-trees and junipers, the
cypresses and olives of that Odyssean coast, we came one afternoon on a
pink house bearing the legend: "Osteria di Tranquillita,"; and, partly
because of the name, and partly because we did not expect to find a house
at all in those goat-haunted groves above the waves, we tarried for
contemplation. To the familiar simplicity of that Italian building there
were not lacking signs of a certain spiritual change, for out of the
olive-grove which grew to its very doors a skittle-alley had been formed,
and two baby cypress-trees were cut into the effigies of a cock and hen.
The song of a gramophone, too, was breaking forth into the air, as it
were the presiding voice of a high and cosmopolitan mind. And, lost in
admiration, we became conscious of the odour of a full-flavoured cigar.
Yes--in the skittle-alley a gentleman was standing who wore a bowler hat,
a bright brown suit, pink tie, and very yellow boots. His head was
round, his cheeks fat and well-coloured, his lips red and full under a
black moustache, and he was regarding us through very thick and
half-closed eyelids.

Perceiving him to be the proprietor of the high and cosmopolitan mind, we
accosted him.

"Good-day!" he replied: "I spik English. Been in Amurrica yes."

"You have a lovely place here."

Sweeping a glance over the skittle-alley, he sent forth a long puff of
smoke; then, turning to my companion (of the politer sex) with the air of
one who has made himself perfect master of a foreign tongue, he smiled,
and spoke.

"Too-quiet!"

"Precisely; the name of your inn, perhaps, suggests----"

"I change all that--soon I call it Anglo-American hotel."

"Ah! yes; you are very up-to-date already."

He closed one eye and smiled.

Having passed a few more compliments, we saluted and walked on; and,
coming presently to the edge of the cliff, lay down on the thyme and the
crumbled leaf-dust. All the small singing birds had long been shot and
eaten; there came to us no sound but that of the waves swimming in on a
gentle south wind. The wanton creatures seemed stretching out white arms
to the land, flying desperately from a sea of such stupendous serenity;
and over their bare shoulders their hair floated back, pale in the
sunshine. If the air was void of sound, it was full of scent--that
delicious and enlivening perfume of mingled gum, and herbs, and sweet
wood being burned somewhere a long way off; and a silky, golden warmth
slanted on to us through the olives and umbrella pines. Large wine-red
violets were growing near. On such a cliff might Theocritus have lain,
spinning his songs; on that divine sea Odysseus should have passed. And
we felt that presently the goat-god must put his head forth from behind a
rock.

It seemed a little queer that our friend in the bowler hat should move
and breathe within one short flight of a cuckoo from this home of Pan.
One could not but at first feelingly remember the old Boer saying: "O
God, what things man sees when he goes out without a gun!" But soon the
infinite incongruity of this juxtaposition began to produce within one a
curious eagerness, a sort of half-philosophical delight. It began to seem
too good, almost too romantic, to be true. To think of the gramophone
wedded to the thin sweet singing of the olive leaves in the evening wind;
to remember the scent of his rank cigar marrying with this wild incense;
to read that enchanted name, "Inn of Tranquillity," and hear the bland
and affable remark of the gentleman who owned it--such were, indeed,
phenomena to stimulate souls to speculation. And all unconsciously one
began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of
existence--the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age,
wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this
world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man's spirit till
sometimes he is ready to cry out: "Rather than live where such things can
be, let me die!"

Like a wild bird tracking through the air, one's meditation wandered on,
following that trail of thought, till the chance encounter became
spiritually luminous. That Italian gentleman of the world, with his
bowler hat, his skittle-alley, his gramophone, who had planted himself
down in this temple of wild harmony, was he not Progress itself--the
blind figure with the stomach full of new meats and the brain of raw
notions? Was he not the very embodiment of the wonderful child,
Civilisation, so possessed by a new toy each day that she has no time to
master its use--naive creature lost amid her own discoveries! Was he not
the very symbol of that which was making economists thin, thinkers pale,
artists haggard, statesmen bald--the symbol of Indigestion Incarnate!
Did he not, delicious, gross, unconscious man, personify beneath his
Americo-Italian polish all those rank and primitive instincts, whose
satisfaction necessitated the million miseries of his fellows; all those
thick rapacities which stir the hatred of the humane and thin-skinned!
And yet, one's meditation could not stop there--it was not convenient to
the heart!

A little above us, among the olive-trees, two blue-clothed peasants, man
and woman, were gathering the fruit--from some such couple, no doubt, our
friend in the bowler hat had sprung; more "virile" and adventurous than
his brothers, he had not stayed in the home groves, but had gone forth to
drink the waters of hustle and commerce, and come back--what he was. And
he, in turn, would beget children, and having made his pile out of his
'Anglo-American hotel' would place those children beyond the coarser
influences of life, till they became, perhaps, even as our selves, the
salt of the earth, and despised him. And I thought: "I do not despise
those peasants--far from it. I do not despise myself--no more than
reason; why, then, despise my friend in the bowler hat, who is, after
all, but the necessary link between them and me?" I did not despise the
olive-trees, the warm sun, the pine scent, all those material things
which had made him so thick and strong; I did not despise the golden,
tenuous imaginings which the trees and rocks and sea were starting in my
own spirit. Why, then, despise the skittle-alley, the gramophone, those
expressions of the spirit of my friend in the billy-cock hat? To despise
them was ridiculous!

And suddenly I was visited by a sensation only to be described as a sort
of smiling certainty, emanating from, and, as it were, still tingling
within every nerve of myself, but yet vibrating harmoniously with the
world around. It was as if I had suddenly seen what was the truth of
things; not perhaps to anybody else, but at all events to me. And I felt
at once tranquil and elated, as when something is met with which rouses
and fascinates in a man all his faculties.

"For," I thought, "if it is ridiculous in me to despise my friend--that
perfect marvel of disharmony--it is ridiculous in me to despise anything.
If he is a little bit of continuity, as perfectly logical an expression
of a necessary phase or mood of existence as I myself am, then, surely,
there is nothing in all the world that is not a little bit of continuity,
the expression of a little necessary mood. Yes," I thought, "he and I,
and those olive-trees, and this spider on my hand, and everything in the
Universe which has an individual shape, are all fit expressions of the
separate moods of a great underlying Mood or Principle, which must be
perfectly adjusted, volving and revolving on itself. For if It did not
volve and revolve on Itself, It would peter out at one end or the other,
and the image of this petering out no man with his mental apparatus can
conceive. Therefore, one must conclude It to be perfectly adjusted and
everlasting. But if It is perfectly adjusted and everlasting, we are all
little bits of continuity, and if we are all little bits of continuity it
is ridiculous for one of us to despise another. So," I thought, "I have
now proved it from my friend in the billy-cock hat up to the Universe,
and from the Universe down, back again to my friend."

And I lay on my back and looked at the sky. It seemed friendly to my
thought with its smile, and few white clouds, saffron-tinged like the
plumes of a white duck in sunlight. "And yet," I wondered, "though my
friend and I may be equally necessary, I am certainly irritated by him,
and shall as certainly continue to be irritated, not only by him, but by
a thousand other men and so, with a light heart, you may go on being
irritated with your friend in the bowler hat, you may go on loving those
peasants and this sky and sea. But, since you have this theory of life,
you may not despise any one or any thing, not even a skittle-alley, for
they are all threaded to you, and to despise them would be to blaspheme
against continuity, and to blaspheme against continuity would be to deny
Eternity. Love you cannot help, and hate you cannot help; but contempt
is--for you--the sovereign idiocy, the irreligious fancy!"

There was a bee weighing down a blossom of thyme close by, and underneath
the stalk a very ugly little centipede. The wild bee, with his little
dark body and his busy bear's legs, was lovely to me, and the creepy
centipede gave me shudderings; but it was a pleasant thing to feel so
sure that he, no less than the bee, was a little mood expressing himself
out in harmony with Designs tiny thread on the miraculous quilt. And I
looked at him with a sudden zest and curiosity; it seemed to me that in
the mystery of his queer little creepings I was enjoying the Supreme
Mystery; and I thought: "If I knew all about that wriggling beast, then,
indeed, I might despise him; but, truly, if I knew all about him I should
know all about everything--Mystery would be gone, and I could not bear to
live!"

So I stirred him with my finger and he went away.

"But how"--I thought "about such as do not feel it ridiculous to despise;
how about those whose temperaments and religions show them all things so
plainly that they know they are right and others wrong? They must be in a
bad way!" And for some seconds I felt sorry for them, and was
discouraged. But then I thought: "Not at all--obviously not! For if
they do not find it ridiculous to feel contempt, they are perfectly right
to feel contempt, it being natural to them; and you have no business to
be sorry for them, for that is, after all, only your euphemism for
contempt. They are all right, being the expressions of contemptuous
moods, having religions and so forth, suitable to these moods; and the
religion of your mood would be Greek to them, and probably a matter for
contempt. But this only makes it the more interesting. For though to
you, for instance, it may seem impossible to worship Mystery with one
lobe of the brain, and with the other to explain it, the thought that
this may not seem impossible to others should not discourage you; it is
but another little piece of that Mystery which makes life so wonderful
and sweet."

The sun, fallen now almost to the level of the cliff, was slanting upward
on to the burnt-red pine boughs, which had taken to themselves a quaint
resemblance to the great brown limbs of the wild men Titian drew in his
pagan pictures, and down below us the sea-nymphs, still swimming to
shore, seemed eager to embrace them in the enchanted groves. All was
fused in that golden glow of the sun going down-sea and land gathered
into one transcendent mood of light and colour, as if Mystery desired to
bless us by showing how perfect was that worshipful adjustment, whose
secret we could never know. And I said to myself: "None of those
thoughts of yours are new, and in a vague way even you have thought them
before; but all the same, they have given you some little feeling of
tranquillity."

And at that word of fear I rose and invited my companion to return toward
the town. But as we stealthy crept by the "Osteria di Tranquillita," our
friend in the bowler hat came out with a gun over his shoulder and waved
his hand toward the Inn.

"You come again in two week--I change all that! And now," he added, "I
go to shoot little bird or two," and he disappeared into the golden haze
under the olive-trees.

A minute later we heard his gun go off, and returned homeward with a
prayer.

1910.

MAGPIE OVER THE HILL

I lay often that summer on a slope of sand and coarse grass, close to the
Cornish sea, trying to catch thoughts; and I was trying very hard when I
saw them coming hand in hand.

She was dressed in blue linen, and a little cloud of honey-coloured hair;
her small face had serious eyes the colour of the chicory flowers she was
holding up to sniff at--a clean sober little maid, with a very touching
upward look of trust. Her companion was a strong, active boy of perhaps
fourteen, and he, too, was serious--his deep-set, blacklashed eyes looked
down at her with a queer protective wonder; the while he explained in a
soft voice broken up between two ages, that exact process which bees
adopt to draw honey out of flowers. Once or twice this hoarse but
charming voice became quite fervent, when she had evidently failed to
follow; it was as if he would have been impatient, only he knew he must
not, because she was a lady and younger than himself, and he loved her.

They sat down just below my nook, and began to count the petals of a
chicory flower, and slowly she nestled in to him, and he put his arm
round her. Never did I see such sedate, sweet lovering, so trusting on
her part, so guardianlike on his. They were like, in miniature---though
more dewy,--those sober couples who have long lived together, yet whom
one still catches looking at each other with confidential tenderness, and
in whom, one feels, passion is atrophied from never having been in use.

Long I sat watching them in their cool communion, half-embraced, talking
a little, smiling a little, never once kissing. They did not seem shy of
that; it was rather as if they were too much each other's to think of
such a thing. And then her head slid lower and lower down his shoulder,
and sleep buttoned the lids over those chicory-blue eyes. How careful he
was, then, not to wake her, though I could see his arm was getting stiff!
He still sat, good as gold, holding her, till it began quite to hurt me
to see his shoulder thus in chancery. But presently I saw him draw his
arm away ever so carefully, lay her head down on the grass, and lean
forward to stare at something. Straight in front of them was a magpie,
balancing itself on a stripped twig of thorn-tree. The agitating bird,
painted of night and day, was making a queer noise and flirting one wing,
as if trying to attract attention. Rising from the twig, it circled,
vivid and stealthy, twice round the tree, and flew to another a dozen
paces off. The boy rose; he looked at his little mate, looked at the
bird, and began quietly to move toward it; but uttering again its queer
call, the bird glided on to a third thorn-tree. The boy hesitated
then--but once more the bird flew on, and suddenly dipped over the hill.
I saw the boy break into a run; and getting up quickly, I ran too.

When I reached the crest there was the black and white bird flying low
into a dell, and there the boy, with hair streaming back, was rushing
helter-skelter down the hill. He reached the bottom and vanished into
the dell. I, too, ran down the hill. For all that I was prying and must
not be seen by bird or boy, I crept warily in among the trees to the edge
of a pool that could know but little sunlight, so thickly arched was it
by willows, birch-trees, and wild hazel. There, in a swing of boughs
above the water, was perched no pied bird, but a young, dark-haired girl
with, dangling, bare, brown legs. And on the brink of the black water
goldened, with fallen leaves, the boy was crouching, gazing up at her
with all his soul. She swung just out of reach and looked down at him
across the pool. How old was she, with her brown limbs, and her gleaming,
slanting eyes? Or was she only the spirit of the dell, this elf-thing
swinging there, entwined with boughs and the dark water, and covered with
a shift of wet birch leaves. So strange a face she had, wild, almost
wicked, yet so tender; a face that I could not take my eyes from. Her
bare toes just touched the pool, and flicked up drops of water that fell
on the boy's face.

From him all the sober steadfastness was gone; already he looked as wild
as she, and his arms were stretched out trying to reach her feet. I
wanted to cry to him: "Go back, boy, go back!" but could not; her elf
eyes held me dumb-they looked so lost in their tender wildness.

And then my heart stood still, for he had slipped and was struggling in
deep water beneath her feet. What a gaze was that he was turning up to
her--not frightened, but so longing, so desperate; and hers how
triumphant, and how happy!

And then he clutched her foot, and clung, and climbed; and bending down,
she drew him up to her, all wet, and clasped him in the swing of boughs.

I took a long breath then. An orange gleam of sunlight had flamed in
among the shadows and fell round those two where they swung over the dark
water, with lips close together and spirits lost in one another's, and in
their eyes such drowning ecstasy! And then they kissed! All round me
pool, and leaves, and air seemed suddenly to swirl and melt--I could see
nothing plain! . . . What time passed--I do not know--before their
faces slowly again became visible! His face the sober boy's--was turned
away from her, and he was listening; for above the whispering of leaves a
sound of weeping came from over the hill. It was to that he listened.

And even as I looked he slid down from out of her arms; back into the
pool, and began struggling to gain the edge. What grief and longing in
her wild face then! But she did not wail. She did not try to pull him
back; that elfish heart of dignity could reach out to what was coming, it
could not drag at what was gone. Unmoving as the boughs and water, she
watched him abandon her.

Slowly the struggling boy gained land, and lay there, breathless. And
still that sound of lonely weeping came from over the hill.

Listening, but looking at those wild, mourning eyes that never moved from
him, he lay. Once he turned back toward the water, but fire had died
within him; his hands dropped, nerveless--his young face was all
bewilderment.

And the quiet darkness of the pool waited, and the trees, and those lost
eyes of hers, and my heart. And ever from over the hill came the little
fair maiden's lonely weeping.

Then, slowly dragging his feet, stumbling, half-blinded, turning and
turning to look back, the boy groped his way out through the trees toward
that sound; and, as he went, that dark spirit-elf, abandoned, clasping
her own lithe body with her arms, never moved her gaze from him.

I, too, crept away, and when I was safe outside in the pale evening
sunlight, peered back into the dell. There under the dark trees she was
no longer, but round and round that cage of passion, fluttering and
wailing through the leaves, over the black water, was the magpie,
flighting on its twilight wings.

I turned and ran and ran till I came over the hill and saw the boy and
the little fair, sober maiden sitting together once more on the open
slope, under the high blue heaven. She was nestling her tear-stained
face against his shoulder and speaking already of indifferent things.
And he--he was holding her with his arm and watching over her with eyes
that seemed to see something else.

And so I lay, hearing their sober talk and gazing at their sober little
figures, till I awoke and knew I had dreamed all that little allegory of
sacred and profane love, and from it had returned to reason, knowing no
more than ever which was which.

1912.

SHEEP-SHEARING

From early morning there had been bleating of sheep in the yard, so that
one knew the creatures were being sheared, and toward evening I went
along to see. Thirty or forty naked-looking ghosts of sheep were penned
against the barn, and perhaps a dozen still inhabiting their coats. Into
the wool of one of these bulky ewes the farmer's small, yellow-haired
daughter was twisting her fist, hustling it toward Fate; though pulled
almost off her feet by the frightened, stubborn creature, she never let
go, till, with a despairing cough, the ewe had passed over the threshold
and was fast in the hands of a shearer. At the far end of the barn,
close by the doors, I stood a minute or two before shifting up to watch
the shearing. Into that dim, beautiful home of age, with its great
rafters and mellow stone archways, the June sunlight shone through
loopholes and chinks, in thin glamour, powdering with its very
strangeness the dark cathedraled air, where, high up, clung a fog of old
grey cobwebs so thick as ever were the stalactites of a huge cave. At
this end the scent of sheep and wool and men had not yet routed that home
essence of the barn, like the savour of acorns and withering beech
leaves.

They were shearing by hand this year, nine of them, counting the postman,
who, though farm-bred, "did'n putt much to the shearin'," but had come to
round the sheep up and give general aid.

Sitting on the creatures, or with a leg firmly crooked over their heads,
each shearer, even the two boys, had an air of going at it in his own
way. In their white canvas shearing suits they worked very steadily,
almost in silence, as if drowsed by the "click-clip, click-clip" of the
shears. And the sheep, but for an occasional wriggle of legs or head,
lay quiet enough, having an inborn sense perhaps of the fitness of
things, even when, once in a way, they lost more than wool; glad too,
mayhap, to be rid of their matted vestments. From time to time the
little damsel offered each shearer a jug and glass, but no man drank till
he had finished his sheep; then he would get up, stretch his cramped
muscles, drink deep, and almost instantly sit down again on a fresh
beast. And always there was the buzz of flies swarming in the sunlight
of the open doorway, the dry rustle of the pollarded lime-trees in the
sharp wind outside, the bleating of some released ewe, upset at her own
nakedness, the scrape and shuffle of heels and sheep's limbs on the
floor, together with the "click-clip, click-clip" of the shears.

As each ewe, finished with, struggled up, helped by a friendly shove, and
bolted out dazedly into the pen, I could not help wondering what was
passing in her head--in the heads of all those unceremoniously treated
creatures; and, moving nearer to the postman, I said:

"They're really very good, on the whole."

He looked at me, I thought, queerly.

"Yaas," he answered; "Mr. Molton's the best of them."

I looked askance at Mr. Molton; but, with his knee crooked round a young
ewe, he was shearing calmly.

"Yes," I admitted, "he is certainly good."

"Yaas," replied the postman.

Edging back into the darkness, away from that uncomprehending youth, I
escaped into the air, and passing the remains of last year's stacks under
the tall, toppling elms, sat down in a field under the bank. It seemed to
me that I had food for thought. In that little misunderstanding between
me and the postman was all the essence of the difference between that
state of civilisation in which sheep could prompt a sentiment, and that
state in which sheep could not.

The heat from the dropping sun, not far now above the moorline, struck
full into the ferns and long grass of the bank where I was sitting, and
the midges rioted on me in this last warmth. The wind was barred out, so
that one had the full sweetness of the clover, fast becoming hay, over
which the swallows were wheeling and swooping after flies. And far up,
as it were the crown of Nature's beautiful devouring circle, a buzzard
hawk, almost stationary on the air, floated, intent on something pleasant
below him. A number of little hens crept through the gate one by one,
and came round me. It seemed to them that I was there to feed them; and
they held their neat red or yellow heads to one side and the other,
inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised at my stillness. They were
pretty with their speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump and
young, so that I wondered how many of them would in time feed me.
Finding, however, that I gave them nothing to eat, they went away, and
there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin singing of air passing
through some long tube. I knew it for the whining of my dog, who had
nosed me out, but could not get through the padlocked gate. And as I
lifted him over, I was glad the postman could not see me--for I felt that
to lift a dog over a gate would be against the principles of one for whom
the connection of sheep with good behaviour had been too strange a
thought. And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time would no doubt
come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from the mother tree,
would inspire us, and we should say: "They're really very good!" And I
wondered, were those future watchers of apple-gathering farther from me
than I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman? I thought, too, of the
pretty dreams being dreamt about the land, and of the people who dreamed
them. And I looked at that land, covered with the sweet pinkish-green of
the clover, and considered how much of it, through the medium of sheep,
would find its way into me, to enable me to come out here and be eaten by
midges, and speculate about things, and conceive the sentiment of how
good the sheep were. And it all seemed queer. I thought, too, of a world
entirely composed of people who could see the sheen rippling on that
clover, and feel a sort of sweet elation at the scent of it, and I
wondered how much clover would be sown then? Many things I thought of,
sitting there, till the sun sank below the moor line, the wind died off
the clover, and the midges slept. Here and there in the iris-coloured
sky a star crept out; the soft-hooting owls awoke. But still I lingered,
watching how, one after another, shapes and colours died into twilight;
and I wondered what the postman thought of twilight, that inconvenient
state, when things were neither dark nor light; and I wondered what the
sheep were thinking this first night without their coats. Then, slinking
along the hedge, noiseless, unheard by my sleeping spaniel, I saw a tawny
dog stealing by. He passed without seeing us, licking his lean chops.

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