John Galsworthy. Sheila Kaye-Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has travelled a great deal, and widely—America and Egypt, Canada and the Cape, British Columbia and Australia, Russia and the Fiji Islands. It was on the sailing ship which carried him from Adelaide to South Africa twenty-two years ago that he made friends with a sailor who now, as Joseph Conrad, has a fame equal to Galsworthy’s own. It is remarkable that, in spite of these wide wanderings, his plays and novels should almost invariably have an English background. Seldom, if ever, does he go afield, and then it is only to some place more or less known to everyone, such as Austria in Villa Rubein, The Dark Flower, and The Little Dream. He has never, like Conrad, given us the fruit of his voyagings on the far seas, or his tracks over Russian and Canadian plains.

Perhaps this may be due to the fact that no matter how far he may have wandered, his roots are English. Though born in Surrey, he is a Devon man. Galsworthy is of course a well-known Devon name, and for many years now he has lived in Devon, on the eastern rim of Dartmoor.

Again

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