John Galsworthy

“ The House of the Future is always dark. There are few cornerstones to be discerned in the Temple of our Fate. But, of these few, one is the brotherhood and bond of the English-speaking races; not for narrow purposes, but that mankind may yet see Faith and Good Will enshrined, yet breathe a sweeter air, and know a life where Beauty passes, with the sun on her wings. ”

“ We English-speaking nations are by chance as it were, the ballast of the future. It is absolutely necessary for the happiness of the world that we should remain united. The comradeship that we now feel must and surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit—Goodbye to Civilisation! It will vanish [65] like the dew off grass. The betterment not only of the British nations and America, but of all mankind is and must be our object. ”

“ In the making of that song the English-speaking races will assuredly unite. What set this world in motion we know not; the Principle of Life is inscrutable and will for ever be; but we do know, that Earth is yet on the upgrade of existence, the mountain top of man’s life not reached, that many centuries of growth [44] are yet in front of us before Time begins to chill this planet, till it swims, at last, another moon, in space. In the climb to that mountain top, of a happy life for mankind, our two great nations are as guides who go before, roped together in perilous ascent. ”

“ I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?” America has so much, that one despairs of telling to the folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. In my beloved Britain—all told, not half the size of Texas—there is a quiet beauty of a sort which America has not. ”

“ The earth is fair and meant to be enjoyed, if we keep sane bodies. Who dare affront this world of beauty with mean views? There is no darkness but what the ape in us still makes, and in spite of all his monkey-tricks modern man is at heart further from the ape than man has yet been.
To do our jobs really well and to be brotherly! To seek health and ensue Beauty! If, in Britain and America, in all the English-speaking nations, we can put that simple faith into real and thorough practice, what may not this century yet bring forth? ”

“ And it seems to me that the great modern fallacy is the identification of the word wealth with the word welfare. Granted that demand creates supply, and that it is impossible to stop human nature from demanding, the problem is surely to direct demand into the best channels for securing health and happiness. And I venture to say that the mere blind production of wealth and population by no means fills that bill. We ought to produce wealth only in such ways and to such an extent as shall make us all good, clean, healthy, intelligent, and beautiful to look at. ”

“ It is my belief that only in a world thus uniform in its principles of government, and freed from the danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to develop the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy proof against anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolution; and only in such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed.
But though we have now secured a single plane for Western civilisation and ultimately, I hope, for the world, there will be but slow and difficult progress in the lot of mankind. ”

“ Surely, in dim sort we are trying to realise human happiness, trying to reach a far-off goal of health and kindliness and beauty; trying to live so that those qualities which make us human beings—the sense of proportion, the feeling for beauty, pity, and the sense of humour—should be ever more exalted above the habits and passions that we share with the tiger, the ostrich, and the ape. ”

“ Democracy to be real and effective must succeed in throwing up into the positions of administrative power the most trustworthy of its able citizens. In other words it must incorporate and make use of the principle of aristocracy; government by the best—best in spirit, not best-born. Rightly seen, there is no tug between democracy and aristocracy; aristocracy should be the means and machinery by which democracy works itself out. What then can be done to increase in the average voter intelligence and honesty, public spirit and independence? Nothing save by education. ”

“ For these temporary soldiers of what has been not so much a war as a prolonged piece of very horrible carnage, there succeeds something so mild in sensation that it simply will not fill the void. When the dish of life has lost its savour, by reason of violent and uttermost experience, wherewith shall it be salted?
The American Civil War was very long and very dreadful, but it was a human and humane business compared to what Europe has just come through. There is no analogy in history for the present moment. ”

“ I commend to anyone who wishes to understand British peculiarities, justly, subtly studied by a Frenchman, used these words in a recent letter to me: “You English are so strange to us French; you are so utterly different from any other people in the world.” It is true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we feel that only the American people could ever really understand us. And being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do our best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. ”

“ Without an effort we rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative of minds. Why! a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone. ”

“ Whatever philosophic cloak may be thrown over the shoulders of Bolshevism, it is obviously—like every revolutionary movement of the past—an aggregation of individual discontents, the sum of millions of human moods of dissatisfaction with the existing state of things; and whatever philosophic cloak we drape on the body of liberalism, if by that name we may designate our present social and political system—that system has clearly not yet justified its claim to the word evolutionary, so long as the disproportion between the very rich and the very poor continues (as hitherto it has) to grow. ”

“ Not till the Tribunal of the League of Nations has had successes of conciliation, visible to all, will the armed individualist nations of to-day begin to rub their cynical and suspicious eyes, and to sprinkle their armour with moth-powder. No one who, like myself, has recently experienced the sensation of landing in America after having lived in Europe throughout the war, can fail to realise the reluctance of Americans to commit themselves, and the difficulty Americans have in realising the need for doing so. ”

“ America taking the long cut to Beauty—for there are no short cuts to Her, no cheap nostrums by which she can be conjured from the blue. Beauty and Simplicity are the natural antidotes to the feverish industrialism of our age. If only America will begin to take them freely she has it in her power to re-inspire in us older peoples, just now rather breathless and exhausted, the belief in Beauty, and a new fervour for the creation of fine and rare things. ”

“ I long to see the green pushing up, the creative impulse at work in its thousand ways all over the world again; each of us on both continents in his own line doing creative work; and not so much that wealth and comfort, as that health and beauty may be born again. ”

“ Such lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles. All this democratic grumbling, and habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy the salt in a nation’s blood, and elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation’s vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive at what is or is not national necessity and truly identify himself with a national ideal, by simple conviction from within. ”

“ Well, we both have a sense of humour.
But not only self-preservation and the fear of ridicule guard our friendship. We have, I hope, also the feeling that we stand, by geographical and political accident, trustees for the health and happiness of all mankind. The magnitude of this trust cannot be exaggerated, and I would wish that every American and British boy and girl could be brought up to reverence it—not to believe that they are there to whip creation. We are here to serve creation, [109] that creation may be ever better all over the earth, and life more humane, more just, more free. ”

“ Deep in the American spirit and in the English spirit is a curious intense realism—sometimes very highly camouflaged by hot air—an instinct for putting the finger on the button of life, and pressing it there till the bell rings. ”

“ For after all those laughing-stocks, philosophy and art—the beautiful expression of our highest thoughts and fancies—are the lanterns of a nation’s life, and we ought to hang them in each others’ houses. ”

“ It can do as much as any other single agency to raise the level of honesty, intelligence, public spirit, and taste in the average voter, in other words, to build Democracy on a sure foundation. This is a truly tremendous trust; for the safety of civilisation and the happiness of mankind hangs thereby. The saying about little children and the kingdom of heaven was meant for the ears of all those who have it in their power to influence simple folk. To be a good and honest editor, a good and honest journalist is in these days to be a veritable benefactor of mankind. ”

“ From all our hearts a great weight has been lifted; in those fields death no longer sweeps his scythe, and our ears at last are free from the rustling thereof—now comes the test of magnanimity, in all countries. Will modern man rise to the ordering of a sane, a free, a generous life? Each of us loves his own country best, be it a little land or the greatest on earth ”

“ It has, I am sure, had a say in planting in American and Briton, especially the British townsman, a kind of bone-deep defiance of [33] Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest sky, an individual way of looking at things, which nothing can shake. Americans and Britons both, we must and will think for ourselves, and know why we do a thing before we do it. We have that ingrained respect for the individual conscience, which is at the bottom of all free institutions. ”

“ Gentlemen, it is a melancholy fact that the complete man does not live by invention and trade alone. At the risk of being laughed out of Paradise, I dare put in a plea for Beauty. Both our peoples, indeed, are so severely practical that I do feel we run the risk of getting machine-made, and coming actually to look down on those who give themselves to anything so unpractical as the love of Beauty. ”

“ Patriotism ever has that advantage as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and provincialism of course are pretty close relations, and they who can only see beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad points of their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely write themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling. America is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only country in the world ”

“ For all that, the Briton feels deeply; and on those who have fought the experiences of the battlefield have had an effect which almost amounts to metamorphosis. There are now two breeds of British people—such as have been long in the danger zones, and such as have not; shading, of course, into each other through the many who have just smelled powder and peril, and the very few whose imaginations are vibrant enough to have lived the two lives, while only living one. ”

“ They do a little to discover for their children that there are many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world. They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the War is over they will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven forefend that we should see vanish all that is old, all that has as it were the virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is a beauty in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. ”

“ That is the end, and production whether of wealth or population only the means to that end, to be regulated accordingly. As things are, we confuse the means with the end, and make of production a fetich.
Let me take a parallel from the fields of Art. What kind of good in the world is an artist who sets to work to cover the utmost possible acreage of canvas, or to spoil the greatest possible number of reams of paper, in deference to the call from a vulgar and undiscriminating market for all he can produce? Do we admire him—a man whose ideal is blind supply to meet blind demand? ”