THE BOOK ON THE TABLE.

'A COMMENTARY.”

MR. GALSWORTHY has chosen an alluring title. No work so poor but it desires comment; better adverse than none at all. And when the text of the commentator is life itself, and the object of his criticism living men and women, vanity should see to it that he gets a hearing. Mr. Galsworthy's commentary, one may guess, is not intended to be a wholly soothing document. You may, if you choose, bring a man abruptly home to himself by confronting him with the unmistakable effigy of his own solid form and substance, or, more subtly, by drawing his gaze towards a dim projection, unfamiliar, sinister, or even monstrous, which yet on closer inspection he must acknowledge to be the authentic shadow he throws. Mr. Galsworthy employs both methods, and as he turns his bright reflector now upon the closed-up ranks of the comfortable rich, now on the chaotic under-world of poverty and fear, the well-to-do spectator recognises himself equally on either page as the author's objective. Here in this picture see yourself; in this other, your work.' The contrast, it may be said, and its application are not new, and a concentrated civilisation has at least the merit of forcing them to some extent on the consideration of every man. Lazarus no longer waits at the gate. For a trifle he is made free of Dives's house, invades his most private hours, and has access to his mind if not to his bodily presence. The unanswerable pressure of his misery on the private conscience has been set down by Mr. Galsworthy in the sketch 'A Lost Dog,' where all the specious arguments of self-interest and commonsense retreat discomfited before the simple reiterated fact of the lost dog's existence. But we have something more here than ingenious and pointed statements of one of the oldest and most obvious of problems. Beneath the surface show of violent inequality you discover a fine thread of likeness, giving unity and rational sequence to the whole.

We may assume the short paper which heads the rest and gives A Commentary. By John Galsworthy.

its title to the book to be a more or less accurate summary of the author's point of view. The symbolism of the steam-roller is sufficiently obvious, whilst the old man whose call in life was to warn the public of its dangers, with his glib use of 'humanity,' 'morals,' 'government by the people,' 'the milk of human kindness,' and other book-learned properties, is clearly more than his own mouthpiece. At all events, when you have read his commentary on modern life you will have gained the essentials of what this book has to tell you. The roadside philosopher, if you ask him, will give you his opinion, admirably condensed, on most of the outstanding features of the day. He passes under review the whole social structure. At the base, destitution, brutality, degenerate blood; at the head, purblind indifference. The building is neither fair to look upon nor seemingly secure. And you may derive from its contemplation no more consoling reflection than that, bad as it all seems, nobody in particular is to blame. This consolation, such as it is, emerges as you examine more closely the human items of which the fabric is composed. Some, for instance, are simply born tired.' 'You can't do nothing with them; they ain't up to what's wanted of them nowadays. You can't blame them, 's far as I can see.' Some, again, live like the beasts; so would you in the same houses. How can you have morals when you've got to live like that? Let alone humanity? You can't, it stands to reason.' Others you will see taking their pleasures with aimless imbecility because This 'ere modern life it's hollowed of 'em out. People's got so restless. I don't see how you can prevent it.' Of those in the clutches of the law he will tell you: Them fellows come out dead-with their minds squashed out o' them, an' all done with the best intentions, so they tell me.' As for the rich, the comfortable, the official—' Well, they've got their position and one thing and another to consider-they're bound to be cautious; . . . them sort of people they don't mean any 'arm, but they 'aven't got the mind. You can't expect it of them, living their lives. . . I don't blame them.'

The old man, it will be seen, with his impartial and lenient philosophy, is quite in tune with his time, for modern judgments do not err on the side of harshness. Material penalties still wait on breaches of the law, but, morally speaking, our temptation is to acquit the convicted law-breaker without further inquiry. 'Your soul, born undersized, was dwarfed by Life to the commission. VOL. XXV.-NO. 147, N.S.

24

point of crime-so Mr. Galsworthy, with orthodox polite evasion, addresses his criminal in one of the two chapters on prison life which epitomise much popular sentiment on the subject. So far we are all agreed; but the doctrine of irresponsibility is easier to accept than to put in practice, and most of us are accustomed to handle it gingerly, and apply strictly in accordance with our preconceived notions of what should be, as some republican nations, it is said, apply the principle of social equality. To Mr. Galsworthy belongs the credit of following out his theory regardless of consequences. Having accepted without reserve the non-responsibility of the convict, he perceives clearly that the matter cannot rest there. If one mortal, through no will of his own, is born in squalor ruinous to his nature, so is another to enervating comfort; and the child of luxury, it may be, is vitiated the more surely because the poison of his life is sweet. Mr. Galsworthy, when he turns to examine the outwardly more favoured victims of chance, shows himself almost 'too severe a moraler.' Playthings, ornament, and idle laughter are as illegitimate in his world as the criminal at large in the world ruled by judge and prison warders. There is a strain of belated Calvinism in his conviction that the exquisite woman of the world, apostrophised in Chapter VI., was created to no good purpose. The doll of Nature!' he cries, in accents of pain softened by no trace of pleasure. If burning, as well as pretty clothes, were still in fashion, she would be the very stuff to burn. But, for all that, you are not to blame her. This is where she touches the far-away convict in gaol and awakes our interest. The apparent distance is bridged in a single phrase. Circumstance, which fashioned the convict into a thing dumb, atrophied in mind and body, has been no less cruel to the child of fashion. Blind she is, 'in heart and soul and voice and walk, the blindest creature in the world, . . . the long result of forces working in dim, inexorable progress from the remotest time.' And to her, as to the convict, and even more freely, the author grants absolution, repeating with all the emphasis of plain English and italics,' You have never had a chance.'

6

These two, the criminal and the woman of fashion, represent, as it were, the eternal snows of unblamableness, and beneath them range infinitely varying levels of irresponsibility. There, for instance, stretches the great tableland whose inhabitants are comprised under the word 'comfort.' Moderate people, moderately rich, moderately virtuous, immoderately comfortable. In all ages the consolation of governments, the despair of the social reformer,

and the target, more or less unconscious, of his arrows of sarcasm. How to make a mark on surfaces so smooth and polished that your missiles rebound, inflicting no smallest scratch, unless it be on the thrower, less perfectly protected by nature? The problem is tempting precisely because so hard of solution. Mr. Galsworthy, like other social reformers, has his infallible remedy, and we have the privilege of seeing it tested on a typical husband and wife who spend prosperous days in their comfortable, self-contained flat, lifted high above the untranquil street. These people were not in quite so poor a case as the Doll of Nature who never had a chance. Certainly they had their chance of salvation that evening when Fate, to give it no higher name, led them gently to a pair of comfortable stalls, whence, all unsuspecting the benevolent influences about them, they became the unwilling spectators of an uncomfortable' play. The admirable invention! A cunning trap for the worldly, of which John Knox himself might have been proud. But, alas! invented all in vain. Some momentary disturbance there is, as of a pebble cast into a sheltered pool, then the waters of comfort close in again and smooth out the troubled place as if it had never been. And are we not to blame these, seeing they had their chance and threw it away? Well, no. It is true they were not wholly blind; they could if they had chosen have seen-just a little; but a deep instinct, for which Nature was responsible,' made them feel that it was better not to see, and so- You perceive how inexorably the rule works. The real culprit stands always round the corner. This time it is Nature, and since Nature cannot be blamed, what is there left to a prophet but to shake his head mournfully and utter plaintive regrets: If only they could know what is good for them-where Wisdom lies! If only they would go regularly to see "uncomfortable " plays!"

Sometimes as the author continues his patient investigation of human stupidities and wrongs, arriving always at the same absolving conclusion, you are aware of a dim conflict proceeding behind the scenes, as if the prophet's fire protested against some dampingdown process. Certain classes and persons-holders of place and power, men of precise habit, busy men, matter-of-fact men, and all who own good digestions and imperturbable tempers-rouse his most secret antipathies, and against them he restrains himself with difficulty and only in obedience to the necessities of his creed. 'My instinct is to burn you, but reason tells me you are not to blame. However despicable, useless, or harmful you appear, it is

not your fault. The cause lies far behind you, embodied in vague forms which must be respectfully alluded to under the names of Life, Force, Nature, Circumstance, System, in all the dignity of capital letters, whilst man, as befits his subordinate and ineffectual existence, is written in small.'

There is no need to enquire whether the assumptions underlying this work are endorsed by common experience. We have only to note how well-granting the premises-the inevitable results have been indicated. The scene, rigid, airless, and innocent of perspective as a Chinese landscape, is filled with mechanical figures of men and women who arrange themselves obediently in the conventional lines of some old immutable pattern. And if one asks by what force or motive power the vast machinery of life progresses, or even maintains its place, you have to reply that there is no visible sign that the machine moves at all. You find yourself in a world at standstill, water-logged, rolling stupidly in the trough, and as you gaze across the dull waste of surrounding waters you discern a distant beacon whose pallid beams are constant rather than illuminating, and whose name, which you recognise to be appropriate, is 'Courage without Hope.'

With these, its last words, we take leave of our author's Commentary on Modern Life. Regarded as such, some may complain that the selections from the text are arbitrary and insufficient and the interpretation academic. But as a commentary on a particular attitude towards life we shall find it an honest and therefore a suggestive and valuable, though, it must be added, a depressing document. For perhaps, rightly considered, there can be no spectacle more forlorn than that of a race of men at once blameless and without hope.

ELEANOR CECIL.