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Reading Galsworthy, one is constantly reminded of Ibsen and Meredith—-not because he has imitated either one of these masters, but because he continues the formal and spiritual traditions of both. His attitude toward woman is theirs. Meredith himself might have expressed the objection felt by Shelton in "The Island Pharisees" against "the tone in which men spoke of women—not exactly with hostility, not exactly with contempt —best, perhaps, described as cultured jeering." While from the vitriolic pen of Ibsen might have sprung the words uttered by the parson in the same story: "The questions of morality have always lain through God in the hands of men, not women. We are the reasonable sex." In this connection it is interesting to compare the attitude of Nora with that of Mrs. Pendyce, regarding whose decision to leave her husband Galsworthy says: "Just as there was nothing violent in her manner of taking this step, so there was nothing violent in her conception of it. To her it was not running away, a setting of her husband at defiance; there was no concealment of address, no melodramatic 'I cannot come back to you.'" And perfectly delicious is the greeting she gives her startled husband when she returns as quietly as she had gone: "Well are you not glad to sec me?"

Of Galsworthy's methods and power of expression was his formal perfection that first gained a hearing for his art. Be it enough said that he finds beauty everywhere, and that finding it, his soul leaps out in glad ecstasy, uttering words deeply fraught with the glories they celebrate. The sensation is conferred by a few, simple sentences i.e: "Swithin Forsyte lay in bed. The corners of his mouth under his white moustache drooped towards his double chin. "

In the same casual way only can I refer to those strains of irony and tenderness which run forever intertwined through his pages, endowing them with an emotional as well as artistic satisfaction of rarely surpassed intensity. At first, with the sternness of youth still in his veins, he was more bitter than sweet, but with the storing up of years and experience the blending of those two complementary qualities has become more and more perfectly balanced, until at last we find the man capable of such gentle, yet biting, irony as that expressed in his description of the magnificent Swithin Forsyte: "His mind was the junction of two curiously opposed emotions; a lingering and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way and his own fortune, and a sense that a man of his distinction should never have been allowed to soil his mind with work."

In order to classify his art properly, by reference to both its form and spirit, some new term should be invented. Having already spoken of his "symbolical impressionism" in character-drawing implies a merging; of two tendencies that in the past were ever fighting against each other for supremacy. To define the result of such a merger with desirable precision, one might name Galsworthy a "spiritual realist"—a term particularly apposite to a time which contends that the universe is built up not out of matter but of energy.

And this synthetical character of Galsworthy's art manifests itself in many different ways. To add only one more instance—his work may be regarded as one continuous sermon against one-sided individualism, and the whole spirit of his art must be deemed social in the best sense. Yet he recognizes keenly what the race has gained by its ages of overemphasized individualism, and he expresses his understanding in words like these: "Give me a single example of a nation, or an individual, who's ever done any good without having worked up to it from without."

Like Ibsen, Galsworthy is a questioner who leaves the answers to be found by his readers. So fearful is he of taking sides or intruding a lesson that at times, as in "Strife," he appears to some readers guilty of indifference. That he has a philosophy cannot be doubted, but it has generally to be distilled in drops from his works. Here and there, however, one is granted a clear glimpse of the faith that moves the man. For the present generation he has little hope. "You can't get grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles—at least not in one generation," says one of his characters. But better things and better men are coming. "At bottom mankind is splendid," cries Courtier, the knight-errant, "and they're raised by the aspiration that's in all of them." As they rise, they will perceive more and more clearly that "God is within the world, not outside it." Struggling onward, they are filled with "a wayward feeling that the Universe is indivisible, that power has not devolved but evolved, that things are relative, not absolute."

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