Contrasts: Memories of John Galsworthy and George Moore

I

TO-DAY, at the end of January, I went for a walk down through the dim Luxembourg Gardens where they were putting iris plants in among privet bushes. It seemed a curious thing to do. But of course they know what they arc about. I continued down the rue Férou, which, it is said, Dante used to descend on his way from the Montagne-Ste-Geneviève to the Sorbonne, and in which Aramis lived on the ground — and Ernest Hemingway on the top — floor. And how many between the musketeer and the toreador! And so across the Place St-Sulpice, more dimmed by the thaw than even the long alleys of the Luxembourg.

Terrible things— for those to whom terrible things occur in their lives — happen in the last days of January. The heavy drag of winter is then at its most dire, and your courage at its lowest, as if in a long four o’clock in the morning of the year. You seem to pass as if you yourself were invisible in the owl light of the deep streets. . . . Between dog and wolf, they say here. It is a good phrase.

Because, through such tenebrousnesses, I made my way to a café where I sat all alone and read that Galsworthy was dead. A week ago it had been George Moore. So the days between — the days of black frost twilight turning to crepuscular thaws — were days between dog and wolf. . . . Between their deaths!

I sat for a long time looking at the words: —

It seemed wrong to be reading of his death in Paris. And, for me in tawdry light above tawdry nouvel art decorations of a café I much dislike, I saw through the white sheet of paper . . . dull green hop-lands rolling away under the mists of the English North Downs; the sunlight falling through the open door of the stable where he used to give me breakfast; the garden of the Addison Road house. It backed on the marvelous coppices of Holland Park, and the pheasants used to fly from them into the garden.

He had a dog — an immense black spaniel — that seemed to be more to Galsworthy than his books, his friends, himself. A great, dignified, as if exiled-royal, creature. That is why I say between dog and wolf. For, when it came to writing, George Moore was wolf— lean, silent, infinitely swift and solitary. But Galsworthy was the infinitely good, infinitely patient, infinitely tenacious being that guards our sheepfolds and farm sides from the George Moores. Only, there was only one George Moore.

In one January week the Western World lost its most skilled writer — and its best man! So it seems to be wrong to read about the death of Galsworthy here, before the West begins. With George Moore it mattered less. He was as Parisian of the ’seventies to ’eighties as an AngloIrishman could be.

II

The last time I saw Mr. Moore was on the Quai Malaquais. He wandered along before the old book backs, under the gray branches of the plane trees, above the gray Seine. His pale eyes were unseeing in his paler face. They must have seen a Seine and book backs of fifty years before. Sexagenarian graynesses — as when I saw the news of the other death my eyes rested on thirty-year-old Kentish greenness!

I stood with my hat in my hand for several seconds. I always stood with my hat in my hand when George Moore passed me in the streets, and I think that writers of English should stand with their hats in their hands for a second or two on the anniversaries of a January day in 1933. . . . On that day he was walking very slowly, and I waited — as one does when the King goes by — until he was a little way away before I put my hat on again. I don’t think he so much as saw me, though he seemed to acknowledge my salute by a minute sign with the fingers of the hand that hung at his side.

I did not ever know him at all well. If I had not had so great an admiration for his greatness, his clarity of mind, and the chilliness of his temperament, I might have got to know him well, for I saw him often enough. . . .

Once I was writing a preface to a volume of translations from Maupassant. Mr. Henry James had told me some singular details about the life and habits of the author of La Maison Tellier. Conrad had said that these stories were all nonsense. I was not writing about the life or personality of Maupassant — only about his methods of writing. But I thought it might clarify my thoughts if I could get myself posted as to the matter upon which James and Conrad disagreed. Moore had lived in Paris in the great age of impressionistic painters and had known all the naturalistic writers of the last decades of the last century. What I wanted to know was a question of French manners.

I wrote to Mr. Moore and asked him for information as to two succinct points so that he need take no more trouble than to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ He ordered me to go and see him.

He was in a dressing gown, recovering from influenza in a darkish, rather rich room that I found overheated. Before we had even sat down he said: —

‘So you want to steal my thunder!’

I was then young and that annoyed me. I denied that I had any intention of using anything that he said, but he paid no attention. The interview continued disagreeably for me.

There is an early American folk song:—

And I have never been able, in the presence of the great, to express to them the admiration that I usually feel. I try to bide my time until I can slip into the conversation something like ‘your admirable Nets to Catch the Wind ’ — or whatever I judge to be the great one’s favorite work. But Mr. George Moore never gave me the time to manœuvre for position. He said at once that Maupassant had pilfered his ideas in Une Vie and Bel-Ami, and hinted that he had made a very poor job of it as compared with Esther Waters and A Modern Lover.

If you put it to me to-day that Esther Waters is a greater novel than Une Vie, I do not suppose that I should deny it, for Maupassant, great as he may have been as a short-story writer, was not a novelist pur sang. To state that is to deny the gods of my youth, but I was then in the full heat of the Maupassant faith. And Mr. Moore, if he was unobservant as to material details, was a perfect demon for detecting hesitancies of the voice.

It became worse later, for I distinctly chilled him by obstinately stating that I preferred A Drama in Muslin, he, quite properly, thinking that Esther Waters was his masterpiece. But at the moment I had just finished reading the other, and I had read it with a personal enthusiasm for its relative humanity, whereas all the rest of the master’s novels left me — personally — cold. Intensely admiring — but repelled!

So I have that early image of him, standing rather rigid and grim, chilled and monachal in his long dressing gown. He was dismissing me with one hand on the door knob of his dim, overheated room. I had at the moment for the first time the impression of his extreme pallor. That was owing, possibly, to a shaft of light coming from the passage. And he seemed as aloof as if he had been a denizen of another world where there was neither sun nor wind. The impression was so strong that I was relieved that he did not remove his hand from the door knob and offer it to me.

I gathered that he took me for an interviewer. I had told him again and again that I had no intention of printing anywhere anything that he might say, but it had not seemed to make any impression on him. Before I came he had made up his mind that he was going to receive a reporter who was going to pick his brains, and he was a man who had great difficulty in changing his ideas. In those days an interviewer was regarded in England at once with a sort of fearful fascination and as a being some degrees lower than the man who comes to check your gas meter.

So I remained with the impression of something at once querulous and etiolated. (Etiolation is what happens to plants if you grow them in the dark.) I felt as if a minor James had called on a blotted Flaubert. I have already recorded elsewhere the repulsion that James said he had felt when Flaubert had opened his front door to Turgenev and himself — and in a dressing gown! And Flaubert had bellowed at James. Mr. Moore had a servant to open his front door, and his voice was almost too faint, his dressing gown almost too elegant. Nevertheless he always gave me the impression of being a watercolor drawing of the sage of Croisset that, whilst it was still wet, had been nearly bleached with blotting paper.

It was, I fancy, a sort of nervousness engendered by this particular pallor that prevented my making any effort to see any more of the author of Esther Waters.

III

Later I called on him once more at his request, and the visit was even more of a failure. I asked him to give me something for the English Review. He asked me what sort of writing I wanted from him, and we got to something like icy bickering. It was, of course, my fault. I had just been reading a volume of his reminiscences, — Ave atque Vale, I think, — and I had felt such admiration for their beauty of expression and poetry that I said that I liked them infinitely better than anything else he had ever done.

You should never say to a novelist that you prefer his ‘serious’ writings to his fiction, though I find that such few novelist friends as I have always say that to me. But novel writing is a sport infinitely more exciting than the other form, so that almost all writers would prefer to be remembered rather by their imaginations than by their records.

In the end Mr. Moore said that he was engaged in revising one of his novels, but that if I would ask him again in a month or two he might do something for me. I think he really liked the idea, but to my lasting shame I forgot to write to him, and I never saw him alone again.

I suppose it was his aloofness from life that made one always forget George Moore. I have never met a critic with any pretensions to knowledge of letters who would not acknowledge when challenged that Moore was infinitely the most skillful man of letters of his day — the most skillful in the whole world. Yet in an infinite number of reviews and comptes rendus of the literature of the world that I have read — and written — George Moore was almost invariably forgotten. That was due perhaps to the fact that he belonged to no school in England, perhaps to his want of personal geniality, perhaps to something more subtle.

I was walking last night along a cold dark boulevard with a critic possessing a delicate discrimination in letters. He said, talking naturally of Galsworthy: —

‘He was n’t, at least, wicked like George Moore . . . ’ Then he checked and exclaimed almost in mental distress: ‘I don’t know why I say that George Moore was wicked. I know nothing against him personally. I have never heard anything against him, and the Brook Kerith is one of the most beautiful books in the world. But you know what I mean. . . .’

I knew what he meant. It was that something wicked seemed to distill itself from the pages of Moore’s books so that whilst you read them you felt, precisely, mental distress. You felt even mentally distressed at merely remembering the writings of George Moore — as if you were making acquaintance of what goes on in the mind behind the glacial gaze of the serpent that is the Enemy of Man.

I will make a personal confession. It has been my fate to be mistaken for

— or to be told that I resembled — three men that I particularly disliked resembling. Whenever I have gone to public literary assemblies I have inevitably heard two or three people say: ‘Here’s Gosse!’ And two or three others would whisper: ‘Is n’t that man like Oscar Wilde!’ That I could just stomach, though I should much have disliked to meet the fate of either of those writers. But when the late John Quin, the collector, said to me on our first meeting in Ezra’s studio in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, ‘Hullo, George Moore, how well you are looking!’I had hard work to refrain from knocking him down. I think I should have knocked him down if he had not had the sense to see that I looked well

— for George Moore! I had so often been taken for Mr. Moore or told that I resembled him that, by that time, it had become an obsession.

IV

There was nothing of that sort attaching to John Galsworthy. When you thought of him you thought of green fields in the cool, calm, bright weather of George Herbert. He had a sort of Greek aura as of perfect physical motion accompanying measured speculations in a halcyon atmosphere of eternal youth.

I at least have never got over the feeling that he was, as in early days Conrad called him, ‘young Jack.’ And I cannot bring myself really to believe that he ever had any perturbations of the spirit, though actually I have known him have — and indeed I have accompanied him through — some dark periods. And even at this moment I cannot think of him as other than the Fortunate Youth — happy at once in the lines in which his life was laid and in the occasion of his death. For it is no sorrow to die amidst the still resounding acclamations of a whole planet — and in the same week as George Moore. You may have the feeling that, however Fate may deal hereafter with your name, you are at least one of twin pillars that were the terminal stones — the hind portals — of an age.

I was some years younger than Galsworthy, but he did not publish his first book until six years after I had published mine. In consequence, he being always unobtrusive and I overbearing, I got very early into the habit of considering him, and of treating him, as a much younger man — so that when I read of his death it was almost as if I had lost a younger brother in the flower of his age.

I first saw him in a sporting club. They told of him there a curious anecdote; the fame of it hung over him like a curious legend, so that, though I was not introduced to him for several years, I was accustomed to speculate as to what sort of fellow he could be.

In those days he was the young man about town — at any rate to all appearances. He had eaten his dinners at the Middle Temple, which every young man of good position then had to do, so that he was an unpractising barrister. He was moderate in everything, sedulous in the effort to pass unnoticed in the best places where young men about town show themselves. He had a little bachelor establishment, kept a small stable, drank very moderately, and dressed with the careful negligence that was then required of you. So he appeared always to be in harmony with his surroundings. He seemed to sink into his background — on the grand stand of a good race meeting, in the stalls of a good theatre, at an afternoon tea in the best of houses — as harmoniously as a thirteenth-century Madonna sinks into its gold background in a dim twelfthcentury Italian church. He was nevertheless marked out — perhaps because of his legend. I have heard elderly colonels say he was not ‘sound.’

I do not know that I ought to tell that story. It is not derogatory to Galsworthy, but it probably belongs to someone else, and one should not tell other people’s stories. But most of the people who once knew it must be dead by now and the tale is infinitely illustrative. It is this: —

One night a young man — I think it must have been Earl Bathurst or one of the Bathursts — turned up in that club with another young man — Galsworthy. Bathurst wanted to borrow a fiver from somebody. The two had been to the Derby and had done rather well. In the train with them, coming back, there had been a thimblerigger. Galsworthy had been perfectly aware that the fellow was a swindler, but he obstinately backed himself to discover under which thimble was the pea — which was of course under none. With the grim persistence that was the main note of his character, he had backed himself, doubles or quits, against the thimblerigger and his confederates. He had lost all his own money and Bathurst’s, which he borrowed. He lost his watch and chain, tie pin, signet ring. So they had come to that club to borrow money to redeem the watch, which had sentimental associations for Galsworthy, while the thimblerigger waited in the hall. Bathurst had eventually got the money out of the club porter.

Grim persistence — that was what it was. Galsworthy thought that the trick ought to be exposed for the benefit of the public. ‘Ought’ — that was even then his great word!

His face seemed to be always just about to smile, the lines of a smile being always about his lips. Actually he smiled a real smile — the product of an emotion rather than of a generally benevolent attitude — only rarely. He was ‘Devonshire,’ and proud of being Devonshire and proud that the chief attribute of the Devonshire man is a surface softness under which lies the grimmest of obstinacies — the velvet glove on a hand of marble. Nevertheless your main impression of Galsworthy would be his smile — and his softness.

In his physique, too, he had those characteristics. He appeared gentle and inactive, as if with a continuous pensiveness. But he had in his youth muscles of iron, and in athletics the same persistence.

I do not suppose I shall ever forget my surprise just after my first introduction to him. It was at the Pent, when Conrad was stopping with me. I was prepared for something remarkable by Conrad’s really radiant expression when he said, ‘Jack wants to know if he may come down.’ For some days I heard then of ‘Jack.’ I do not know that I even heard his surname, for Conrad had a trick of taking it for granted that you must know everyone whom he knew. Then, at the station appeared the smiling being of the sporting club. That was already an astonishment.

I was driving a wagonette with a pretty good mare. He swung his grips over the side of the cart and would not get in because, he said, he wanted some exercise. The road from Sandling Junction goes immediately up a very steep bluff, so he walked beside the box seat, conversing, as Englishmen of his station converse, about the properties on either side of the road — the Laurence Hardys’ of Sandling, the Deedes’ of Saltwood Castle, Earl Sondes’ a little farther on.

At the top of the bluff he would not get in. He said, ‘Drive on. That will be all right. I need some exercise.’

I said, ‘If you mean to walk, there is a kissing gate in the hedge after the next vent-ways. On the left. You cater the field. You’ll be on Pent Land. You’ll see the house.’

He said, ‘That will be all right. Drive on. I want some exercise.’

I touched up the mare. She was a pretty good goer, aged, but with a strain of Wilfrid Blunt’s Arab blood. I did not expect to see that fellow again until a quarter of an hour after I got to the house. But there he was, still beside the box seat, trotting along with the utmost equanimity. And, as if we had been strolling down Piccadilly, he continued conversing — about the land of the Pent, which is a clayey loam in the bottoms till it runs into the chalk of the Downs; and about how the young partridges were coming on; and about Selby-Lowndes, the redoubtable Master of the East Kent Hounds who had once had a trencher-fed pack in the Cleveland district. Englishmen have to know all these things or they are not ‘sound.’ So he trotted the mile and a quarter to the Pent. I felt like Maupassant when the head of Swinburne rose out of the Mediterranean beside his canoe and the poet swam to shore beside him conversing joyously of Anacreon. Conrad told me afterwards that Jack had held the mile record at Oxford for several years. That needs persistence.

I remember I once had a sort of portable pulpit built to write at. Someone had told me that the reason why painters usually live to be old men whilst writers die relatively young is that painters stand at their work and do not lean over tables, compressing their stomachs and lungs. When Galsworthy saw that pulpit he must have one too, for he wanted to live at least as long as I. I gave up my monstrosity in a very short time, but he persisted with his for many years. So that the image I have of Galsworthy at work is that of a painter before his easel. In those days he wore a painter’s gaberdine when he wrote. He had once the idea of using different colored pencils or ink for passages of differing character. He was always trying new devices. So there he would be, an erect figure, thin, not very tall, blond, camped in front of his pulpit with a blue pencil between his lips, in his right hand a red pen that he had just taken up, and a profusion of other pens and pencils and rubbers and gadgets along the ledge in front of him. Poor Jack!

V

It is sad to have to say, ‘Poor Jack!’ when it is a matter of his being no longer there. But it comes naturally, because whenever Conrad mentioned him in later years it was always as ‘Poor Jack!’ That was because Galsworthy was so worried about his writing. It did not go very fast in the early days. The life social still had its lure for him; he was not very sure of where, as a writer, he was going. He was grimly determined to produce novels, but he was at first hampered and a little depressed by the influence of Conrad, who knew well enough where he was going. Jocelyn is a palish study in the manner of the early Conrad — the Conrad of the Outpost of Progress. Then Turgenev gripped Galsworthy as he must grip every serious writer, and he produced the Villa Rubein, which is a very charming, young book, with, as it were, the face of Turgenev smiling up through every page.

He still, however, worried in our Campden Hill days. His friends and parents jeered at the idea of his writing. His father was a Tartar. I lived at one time next door to him, and that was what the servants said of the old gentleman. Galsworthy père and mère separated, tired of seeing one another, at very advanced ages. There was something pixy-ish and hard about both those old people, the father ferocious, the mother young for her age, flighty, with bright-colored bonnet ribbons. It was not a usual stock, that from which Galsworthy came.

Nevertheless, say in 1903, he still let social considerations weigh in a major degree in the arrangements of his life, though the Arts began to occupy more of his thoughts. One of his sisters, a few yards away on the Hill, was mélomane and gave wonderful concerts; the other was married to Sauter, the tough, dynamic Austrian painter, and lived just down the Hill. Campden Hill, in the royal borough of Kensington, was like a high-class Greenwich in which all the artists should be wealthy, refined, delicate, and well born. It was high in the air. In its almost country roads you met ladies all of whom wore sable coats — or at least sable stoles; and admirable children all bursting with health; and Whistler and Abbey and Henry James.

I lived myself in a house on the very top of the Hill, Galsworthy in a stable just on the other side of the great covered-in reservoir. It was, of course, a converted stable, very beautifully appointed and suitable for a young bachelor of means and slightly romantic tastes. Here he used to give me those admirable English breakfasts two or three times a week to the accompaniment of gleaming silver and the hissing of the tea urn, with, as I have said, the sunlight shining in through the open door. For myself, I have always hated comfort and all its accompaniments, but here something ascetic mingled with the tempered luxury, and I used to sit there feeling like a pleased fishwife who had got into the basement of a palace.

Galsworthy, however, was still worried. He was preparing to break with Society, but his life was still an energetic round of concerts, receptions, race meetings, richer studio teas, theatres, dinners, and the rest. We used to dispute very vigorously, — mostly about writing, — I being clamorous and he very determined over his kidneys and bacon. I used to declare that a writer can learn no more of Turgenev than he can of Shakespeare, both being temperaments rather than writers with methods to be studied. That used to pain Galsworthy. He would declare that no one could avoid being benefited by contact with that temperament of infinite pity and charity.

There came the mental crash. He crossed his Rubicon. I can place the very, agitating day, and after that Galsworthy was no more the young bachelor about town even in appearance. Nor was he any longer ‘Poor Jack.’ He had got religion, and his path was plain.

He never looked back, and gradually our ways parted. I still saw a great deal of him. We still lived close together, but now, down the Hill. I could see the beggars and hard cases from my windows, going from my office of the English Review, round the corner, to Galsworthy’s doorstep that was never without its suppliants. My hard cases were all of the literary sort, such as come to the office of a journal and go on to a Galsworthy. But he had innumerable others. His charities were inexhaustible.

VI

He was helpful with the English Review, but I always thought he was not very approving. That organ was too distinctly literary and in no way either philanthropic or propagandist of social reorganization. I used to go for morning constitutionals with him and Gilbert Cannan. Occasionally with Ezra, across the park to Hyde Park Corner. And always Galsworthy would be rather wistfully suggesting that I should print the work of someone who wanted to reform something — the poor laws, the relations of the sexes. Marwood also was too Tory for him. He used to spit with indignation over Galsworthy’s humanitarian suggestions, so that my life was not very easy when Marwood walked with us, and when, the blameless tool of the Reformers who had by then got the control of the Review, Galsworthy was induced to sit in my editorial chair, I had really a difficult struggle to prevent Marwood’s assaulting him. Galsworthy, of course, was completely innocent of any intrigue, and the incident caused no shadow to fall between us. I had gone for a week’s rest — which I immensely needed — to the countryside in Normandy. And those Reformers, having already a mortgage on the Review, had told poor Jack that I had left the country for good. It was curious the difference there was between his proposal for a number and that which I eventually printed. You would have said it was impossible that Literature could have two such opposed faces.

The difference was that Galsworthy believed that humanity could be benefited by propaganda for virtue of a Christian order, whereas I believed that humanity can only be brought to ameliorate itself if life as it is is presented to it in terms of an art. And the business of Art is not to elevate humanity, but to render. Those are the two schools of thought that have eternally divided humanity, and no one in the end will ever know which will win out. It is not even certain that the Eighteenth Amendment will be repealed — and the Eighteenth Amendment was brought about by exaggerated imaginative statement.

Yet it used to fill me with amazement to see Galsworthy at work — the grim persistence with which he made point after point, the dog-like tenacity with which he held to his thesis. He would ponder for hours and hours. Then the little rabbits would creep out to die after the battues; the law-parted lovers would feel the thumbscrews pinching tighter; the convicts batter on their cell doors until the cruel stupidity of men and their institutions was shown at its apogee — and beyond.

I think that that method is better for plays than for other forms, and possibly at long last it is by his plays that Galsworthy will be remembered. At any rate, for me The Silver Box and Joy were things of rapturous delight when I first saw them, and they remain like bright patches in my memory after more than a lustre. In them his extraordinary genius for contrasting antithesis with antithesis—his extraordinary gift for sticking to a situation till the last shred of drama was extracted from it — was never thrown away and never grew monotonous. And the structure even of his propaganda plays was almost always impeccable.

He could even keep within his cadre with sureness of touch. I remember that after the second performance of The Silver Box he was a good deal worried about the curtain to one of his scenes — the one in which a child is heard crying outside the house in which its mother has been arrested. He thought that this did not come over — that there was no clou to the scene. He sketched several new endings and rejected them. The point was that a middle-class woman, amiable but insensitive, had had the mother of the child arrested on the wrongful suspicion of having stolen the silver cigarette box. The child, finding that its mother did not come home, hung to the railings outside the open window and cried for her, and the scene ended on the sound of the wailing.

I finally suggested that the middleclass woman might send the child out a slice of cake. For the first time in his life I found Jack become really heated. He came out of the depths of his abstraction to say that that was an atrocious suggestion. The woman was a decent, well-brought-up mother. Her maternal instincts — the maternal instincts of any woman — would make her feel that a slice of cake was not a fitting substitute for a mother’s care. So perhaps his detachment from the class that he so skillfully held up to scorn was not as absolute as it seemed to be. He once told me that never, in his man-about-town days, had he been absolutely in the inner circle. Something always marked him off a very little, and he had always the feeling that he was a fish in not quite the right water. But the habits of thought of a youth spent in an atmosphere of so strong a flavor remain singularly in your subconsciousness.

On one of our walks I asked him — just when we were crossing a road — what had become of someone we had both known years before.

He exclaimed, ‘Oh, poor man, his sister’s married a workingman!’

But as soon as we were on the opposite sidewalk he said determinedly, ‘Of course there is no reason why one’s sister should not marry a workingman. But with poor Dash’s notions it is very disagreeable to him.’

I do not mean that there was anything of the hypocritical about him. Heaven knows nobody could be further from the English governing-class frame of mind than I am. I dare say that, if it were ascertainable, it might well appear that I am much more alien to that frame of mind than even Galsworthy ever was — if in a different direction. But if anyone suddenly asks me even now what is my opinion of someone, I find myself replying with an estimate that is astonishingly like that of the great English public school that it was my privilege to attend.

VII

I will try to put on paper the occasion of one of his real smiles. I came in on him once, in the later days in his house in Addison Road. He was reading a cutting from some paper. He had a humorous expression and read on to the end without speaking to me. He said, ‘Those poor devils of penny-aliners! What won’t they say and where won’t they get it from!’ He tossed the slip to me.

The cutting described the early struggles with poverty, the long years of want of recognition, the bitter sufferings that, according to the writer, Galsworthy had gone through.

It was when he took it back and looked over it again that he smiled — the real smile coming out over the one that was always there, coming out very slowly as if the emotion came from somewhere very deep and irresistibly moved his features. He said, ‘Considering that I never had less than several thousands a year, I can’t be said to have suffered. . . . And I don’t believe I was ever conscious of waiting. . . '

It comes into my head that I did, on another occasion, see him in a real temper. You might call it topical, but it happened many years ago. He had remembered after paying his income tax that he had not included a quite considerable sum that he had received for Near-Eastern productions of several of his plays. He had written to the income-tax authorities that he was prepared now to pay this sum. They had answered that the accounts for the year were closed and nothing could be done about it. He had replied by sending a check for the amount. He had received a letter, returning the check, and saying that the Lords Commissioners had ordered that this matter must now close.

At that he was enraged. He asked, How could the country be run? How could justice be done? How was it possible to do anything with officials who took serious matters with that levity? He went on being angry about it and worrying officialdom about the matter for a long time. His concern was so great because, he said, how was it possible that the poorer classes should not be unduly burdened when the comparatively wealthy like himself could escape so easily — even involuntarily!

I will conclude with a little gay story.

I had gone to lunch at the Galsworthys’ one day when he had had to go out to meet a theatre manager before the meal was quite finished. The door closed behind him and Mrs. Galsworthy sprang up and said, ‘Now we’re going to have a treat!'

Galsworthy kept an admirable table, but it was one relatively chaste when compared with my reprehensible culinary feats with garlic and condiments. So Mrs. Galsworthy produced from secret recesses in the sideboard a very wrapped-up Camembert. And when it was unwrapped — well, it was a Camembert!

She said, ‘Poor Jack does n’t forbid me to eat things like this. But nothing so pagan must ever appear when he’s at table.’

When the cheese was quite unwrapped and oozing over our plates, ‘poor Jack’ put his head round the door with his slow, friendly air of reconnoitring. He wrinkled up his nose, smiled as if he had caught two children stealing jam.

Is n’t that,’ he asked, ‘what you would call being caught en flagrant délit? Or is it fragrant delights?’

So he was not above making a pun on occasion.

The last time I saw him was at one of those attempts to establish an entente between Anglo-Saxon and French writers over which he admirably shed his aureole. Curiously enough, it was in Paris. The French loved him for his admirable presence, his oldworld dignity, his aureole, and his charming French that was hesitant only because of his modesty. And standing, dominating that crowd of hard-shelled Gallic writers as a white swan might float over an assembly of black herons, he told them that if he had any skill in letters it came from France. It came from a long discipleship to Flaubert and Maupassant and Anatole France . . . and to Turgenev and Conrad, who themselves had learned all they knew of writing from French writers.

It was curious and touching to hear that valiant pronouncement.