Another Sheaf
By . New York: CharlesScribner’s Sons, 1919. 12mo. $1.25.
THIS is a sheaf of varied contents, comprising many problems, practical and spiritual, of this great moment. Through the manifold lines of thought expressed in the papers, we find Mr. Galsworthy, whether at his old task of artistic interpretation, or at this new task of presenting fact and social theory, doing his bit in the work of reconstruction. Here, as always, he shows that gift of imaginative sympathy which gives his work in fiction and in drama a distinctive quality. That wistful sensitiveness to suffering of men and of women, of children and of animals, which has often in his work seemed to fall short of hope, here, at least, rises to resolution. The war has braced his soul, as it has the souls of countless other human beings.
‘The Sacred Work’ is, perhaps, ethically, the most important paper in the book. This is a plea for those who have come unscathed through the war, to give their utmost and best to help recreate those who have been maimed and broken in the great struggle. Only the understanding that comes of fine imaginative insight could divine their inmost need — to be made to feel themselves still alive, to be trained to do things, so that they may still be men among men, creative, independent. 'So comes the sacred task.'
Of special interest to Americans is Mr. Galsworthy’s reiterated plea for deeper friendship between American and Briton. To him, much of the hope of the future depends upon such a friendship, and his sense of the great part that America has to play takes one’s breath. ‘If America walks upright, so shall we; if she goes bowed under the weight of machines, money, and materialism, we, too, shall creep our ways.’
His keen analysis of both Briton and American is full of interest, as is his ready admission of that which is lacking in his own people. When John Bull turns to us so winning a face, and holds out hands so friendly for the strengthening of that which is best in both peoples, we shall be churlish indeed if we refuse such offered friendship. Nor can we do so without great loss to ourselves, of comradeship with those who are one with us in basic ideals of honor, courage, duty.
We must listen to Mr. Galsworthy. If the future of the world depends upon understanding between men and nations, we have reason to be thankful for his peculiar gift of sympathetic insight; he lives always in the House of the Interpreter. We in America dare not turn a deaf ear to one who says that we hold in our hands the scales that shall decide for the future between a crass materialism and a higher hope.
‘Speculations,’ with its fine sense of spiritual values, will help us find how to become masters, not slaves, of our civilization; how to keep from ‘Gadarening’ into the sea, ‘pursued by the devils of machinery’; how to escape the ‘yell of material expansion and vulgarity’ toward which our faces were set before the war. It is now or never with civilization, now or never with democracy. ‘Democracy, to be sound, must utilize . . . the aristocracy of spirit.’ M. S.