John Galsworthy

“ The time has come when she will brood, and interpret more and more the underlying truths, and body forth an art which shall be a spiritual guide, shed light, and show the meaning of her multiple existence. It will reveal dark things, but also those quiet heights to which man's spirit turns for rest and faith in this bewildering maze of a world. And to this art about to come—art inevitably moves [Pg 139] slowly—into its own, to American drama, poetry, fiction, music, painting, sculpture—sincerity, an unswerving fidelity to self, alone will bring the dignity worthy of a great and free people. ”

“ The Angel of Peace, watching the slow folding back of this darkness, will look on an earth of cripples. The field of the world is strewn with half-living men. That loveliness which is the creation of the æsthetic human spirit; that flowering of directed energy which we know as civilisation; that manifold and mutual service which we call progress—all stand mutilated and faltering. As though, on a pilgrimage to the dreamed-of Mecca, water had failed, and by the wayside countless muffled forms sat waiting for rain; so will the long road of mankind look to-morrow. ”

“ The sacred work is vitally concerned to defeat this hand-to-mouth philosophy. Side by side in man, and especially in Anglo-Saxon, there live two creatures. One of them lies on his back and smokes; the other runs a race; now one, now the other, seems to be the whole man. The sacred work has for its end to keep the runner on his feet; to proclaim the nobility of running. A man will do for mankind or for his country what he will not do for himself; but mankind marches on, and countries live and grow, and need our services in peace no less than in war. ”

“ The same herd-life and the same sights and sounds pursue them from birth; they also are soon divested of the grace and free look which you see in country children walking to and from school or roaming the hedges. Whether true slum children, or from streets a little better off, quickly they all pass out of youth into the iron drive of commerce and manufacture, into the clang and clatter, the swish and whirr of wheels, the strange, dragging, saw-like hubbub of industry, or the clicking and pigeon-holes of commerce; perch on a devil's see-saw from monotonous work to cheap sensation and back. ”

“ Love of country, which, like some little secret lamp, glows in every heart, hardly to be seen of our eyes when the world is at peace—love of the old, close things, the sights, sounds, scents we have known from birth; loyalty to our fathers' deeds and our fathers' hopes; the clutch of Motherland—this love sent our soldiers and sailors forth to the long endurance, to the doing of such deeds, and the bearing of so great and evil pain as can never be told. The countries for which they have dared and suffered have now to play their part. ”

“ Our civilisation reminds one of the corpse in the Mark Twain story which, at its own funeral, got up and rode with the driver. It is watching itself being buried. We discover, and scatter discovery broadcast among a society uninstructed in the proper use of it. Consider the town-ridden, parasitic condition of Great Britain—the country which cannot feed itself. If we are beaten in this war, it will be because we have let our industrial system run away with us; because we became so sunk in machines and money-getting that we forgot our self-respect. ”

“ There will be no permanent stablishing of our agriculture, no lasting advance towards safety and health, if we have not vision and a fixed ideal. The ruts of the past were deep, and our habit is to walk along without looking to left or right. A Liberalism worthy of the word should lift its head and see new paths. The Liberalism of the past, bent on the improvement of the people and the growth of good-will between nations, forgot in that absorption to take in the whole truth. ”

“ Great artists, like Whistler and Henry James, will no longer seek their quiet environments in Europe. I believe that this war will be for America the beginning of a great art age; I hope so with all my heart. For art will need a kind home and a new lease of life.
A certain humble and yet patient and enduring belief in himself and his own vision is necessary to the artist. I think that Americans have only just begun to believe in themselves as artists, but that this belief is now destined to grow quickly. ”

“ What made this world we know not; the principle of life is inscrutable and will for ever be; but we know that Earth is yet on the up-grade of existence, the mountain-top of man's life not reached, that many centuries [Pg 111] of growth are yet in front of us before Nature 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 who have lived most of my time on a farm for many years, in daily contact with farmer and labourer, do really appreciate what variety and depth of knowledge is wanted for good farming. It is a lesson to the armchair reformer to watch a farmer walking across the "home meadow" whence he can see a good way over his land. One can feel the slow wisdom working in his head. A halt, a look this way and that, a whistle, the call of some instruction so vernacular that only a native could understand; the contemplation of sheep, beasts, sky, crops ”

“ We English-speaking nations are by chance as it were the ballast of the future. It is absolutely necessary that we should remain united. The comradeship we now feel must and surely shall abide. For unless we work together, and in no selfish or exclusive spirit—good-bye to Civilisation! It will vanish 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. ”

“ Such a transformation cannot come unless we are genuinely ashamed that Britain should be a sponge; unless we truly wish to make her again sound metal, ringing true, instead of a splay-footed creature, dependent for vital nourishment on oversea supplies—a cockshy for every foe.
We are practically secured by Nature, yet have thrown security to the winds because we cannot feed ourselves! We have as good a climate and soil as any in the world, not indeed for pleasure, but for health and food, and yet, I am sure, we are rotting physically faster than any other people! ”

“ On the lack of any standard or restraint, any real glimpse of Nature, any knowledge of a future worth striving for, or indeed of any future at all, they thrive forward into that hand-to-mouth mood from which they are mostly destined never to emerge. Quick and scattery as monkeys, and never alone, they become, at a rake's progress, little fragments of the herd. On poor food, poor air, and habits of least resistance, they wilt and grow distorted, acquiring withal the sort of pathetic hardihood which a Dartmoor pony will draw out of moor life in a frozen winter. ”

“ 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? Shall man, the highest product of creation, be content to pass his little day in a house, like unto Bedlam? ”

“ What, then, is lying at the back of any growth or development there may have been of late in drama?
In my belief, simply an outcrop of sincerity—of fidelity to mood, to impression, to self. A man here and there has turned up who has imagined something true to what he has really seen and felt, and has projected it across the foot-lights in such a way as to make other people feel it. This is all that has happened lately on our stage. And if it be growth, it will not be growth in quantity, since there is nothing like sincerity for closing the doors of theatres. ”

“ What American or British knife will sever the rope?
He who ever gives a thought to the life of man at large, to his miseries and disappointments, to the waste and cruelty of existence, will remember that if American or Briton fail himself, or fail the other, there can but be for us both, and for all other peoples, a hideous slip, a swift and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall be to begin over again. ”

“ He sharpens his mind, only to lose it and acquire instead that of the herd.
To compete with this lure of the towns, there must first be national consciousness of its danger; then coherent national effort to fight it. We must destroy the shibboleth: "All for wealth!" and re-write it: "All for health!"—the only wealth worth having. Wealth is not an end, surely. Then, to what is it the means, if not to health? Once we admit that in spite of our wealth our national health is going downhill through town-blight, we assert the failure of our country's ideals and life. ”

“ What we call "good form," the unwritten law which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours of the dull and glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has grown up like callous shell round two fine ideals—suppression of the ego lest it trample on the corns of other people, and exaltation of the maxim: "Deeds before words." Good form, like any other religion, starts well with some ethical truth, but soon gets commonised and petrified till we can hardly trace its origin, and watch with surprise its denial and contradiction of the root idea. ”

“ The national mood with them will be more than ever that of inquiry and exploit. With us, unless I make a mistake, after a spurt of hedonism—a going on the spree—there will be lassitude. Every European country has been overtried in this hideous struggle, and Nature, with her principle of balance, is bound to take redress. For Americans the war, nationally speaking, will have been but a bracing of the muscles and nerves, a clearing of the skin and eyes. Such a mental and moral condition will promote in them a deeper philosophy and a more resolute facing of truth. ”

“ Does any man think that a momentary exhaustion of our enemy is going to prevent that huge and vigorous nation from becoming strong again? Does he believe that we can trust a League of Nations—a noble project, for which we must all work—to prevent war till we have seen it successful for at least a generation? Does he consider that our national physique will stand another fifty years of rampant industrialism without fresh country stocks to breed from? ”

“ She lives so far away from other nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only people in the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make up America there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism. America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and climate, and life to her is still a great adventure. Americans have their own form of self-absorption, but seem free as yet from the special competitive self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through long centuries by countless continental rivalries and wars. ”

“ I wish her well in this particular activity. And the Government she serves with such devotion will betray her if, when DORA is in her grave—consummation devoutly to be wished—her work on allotment gardens is not continued. There is always a ring of land round a town, like a halo round the moon. As the town's girth increases, so should that halo; and even in time of peace, larger and larger, not less and less, should grow the number of town dwellers raising vegetables, fruit and flowers, resting their nerves and expanding lungs and muscles with healthy outdoor work. ”