Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
    Ebook214 pages3 hours

    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy

    By John Galsworthy

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy is a collection of essays. Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright. Excerpt: "They sat down just below my nook, and began to count the petals of a chicory flower, and slowly she nestled in to him, and he put his arm round her. Never did I see such sedate, sweet lovering, so trusting on her part, so guardianlike on his."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateMay 18, 2021
    ISBN4057664621849
    The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
    Author

    John Galsworthy

    John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was an English short story writer, novelist, and playwright whose work spanned the better part of four decades. Author of more than seventy books, Galsworthy is best remembered for the Forsyte Saga as well as its follow-up trilogies, a Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. A tireless champion of women’s rights, prison reform, and free speech, Galsworthy turned down knighthood out of the belief that writing was a reward within itself. His works have often been adapted for television and film, and in 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

    Read more from John Galsworthy

    Related to The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy

    Related ebooks

    Reference For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad

      Dec 9, 2019

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Whale Who Will Come Soon

      Sep 8, 2021

      The beachfront narrows to an ocherous ribbon, belted by blue, above and below. After a while, a handful of shearwaters appear in the air above the Cat Balou. The birds flash around us; like knife-thrower tricks at a circus. Diving through the water,

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      John Ashbery

      Mar 15, 2019

      He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise o

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Home

      Dec 27, 2018

      Home
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      It Had To Be Stew

      May 22, 2022

      It Had To Be Stew
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      La Otra Historia

      Jun 30, 2022

      La Otra Historia
      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From Cantares Mexicanos

      Dec 1, 2023

      Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      In a hotel in a small town in Norfolk I am listening to someonethrowing glass bottles into a metal bin: toss-shatter, toss-shatter.There are no other sounds; it’s a quiet afternoonbut the one tossing them has a sense of rhythm and I havea sense that

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems by Geoffrey Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      62. Why such irony in re the mystical context when a graph of even the most commonplace exchange would appear perplexed; when we drop out from the plainest statement in the posture of a bat? So, decide to make something of that, the style to resemble

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 12, 2021

      As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet a

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Young Hearts…

      Oct 24, 2017

      Young Hearts…
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses

      Jun 3, 2021

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy - John Galsworthy

      John Galsworthy

      The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      [email protected]

      EAN 4057664621849

      Table of Contents

      CONCERNING LIFE

      THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY

      MAGPIE OVER THE HILL

      SHEEP-SHEARING

      EVOLUTION

      RIDING IN MIST

      THE PROCESSION

      A CHRISTIAN

      WIND IN THE ROCKS

      MY DISTANT RELATIVE

      THE BLACK GODMOTHER

      CONCERNING LIFE

      QUALITY

      THE GRAND JURY—IN TWO PANELS AND A FRAME

      GONE

      THRESHING

      THAT OLD-TIME PLACE

      ROMANCE—THREE GLEAMS

      MEMORIES

      FELICITY

      CONCERNING LETTERS

      A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY

      SOME PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA

      MEDITATION ON FINALITY

      WANTED-SCHOOLING

      REFLECTIONS ON OUR DISLIKE OF THINGS AS THEY ARE

      THE WINDLESTRAW

      CENSORSHIP AND ART

      ABOUT CENSORSHIP

      VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART

      Je vous dirai que l'exces est toujours un mal.

      —ANATOLE FRANCE

      CONCERNING LIFE

      Table of Contents

      THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY

      Table of Contents

      Under a burning blue sky, among the pine-trees and junipers, the cypresses and olives of that Odyssean coast, we came one afternoon on a pink house bearing the legend: Osteria di Tranquillita,; and, partly because of the name, and partly because we did not expect to find a house at all in those goat-haunted groves above the waves, we tarried for contemplation. To the familiar simplicity of that Italian building there were not lacking signs of a certain spiritual change, for out of the olive-grove which grew to its very doors a skittle-alley had been formed, and two baby cypress-trees were cut into the effigies of a cock and hen. The song of a gramophone, too, was breaking forth into the air, as it were the presiding voice of a high and cosmopolitan mind. And, lost in admiration, we became conscious of the odour of a full-flavoured cigar. Yes—in the skittle-alley a gentleman was standing who wore a bowler hat, a bright brown suit, pink tie, and very yellow boots. His head was round, his cheeks fat and well-coloured, his lips red and full under a black moustache, and he was regarding us through very thick and half-closed eyelids.

      Perceiving him to be the proprietor of the high and cosmopolitan mind, we accosted him.

      Good-day! he replied: I spik English. Been in Amurrica yes.

      You have a lovely place here.

      Sweeping a glance over the skittle-alley, he sent forth a long puff of smoke; then, turning to my companion (of the politer sex) with the air of one who has made himself perfect master of a foreign tongue, he smiled, and spoke.

      Too-quiet!

      Precisely; the name of your inn, perhaps, suggests——

      I change all that—soon I call it Anglo-American hotel.

      Ah! yes; you are very up-to-date already.

      He closed one eye and smiled.

      Having passed a few more compliments, we saluted and walked on; and, coming presently to the edge of the cliff, lay down on the thyme and the crumbled leaf-dust. All the small singing birds had long been shot and eaten; there came to us no sound but that of the waves swimming in on a gentle south wind. The wanton creatures seemed stretching out white arms to the land, flying desperately from a sea of such stupendous serenity; and over their bare shoulders their hair floated back, pale in the sunshine. If the air was void of sound, it was full of scent—that delicious and enlivening perfume of mingled gum, and herbs, and sweet wood being burned somewhere a long way off; and a silky, golden warmth slanted on to us through the olives and umbrella pines. Large wine-red violets were growing near. On such a cliff might Theocritus have lain, spinning his songs; on that divine sea Odysseus should have passed. And we felt that presently the goat-god must put his head forth from behind a rock.

      It seemed a little queer that our friend in the bowler hat should move and breathe within one short flight of a cuckoo from this home of Pan. One could not but at first feelingly remember the old Boer saying: O God, what things man sees when he goes out without a gun! But soon the infinite incongruity of this juxtaposition began to produce within one a curious eagerness, a sort of half-philosophical delight. It began to seem too good, almost too romantic, to be true. To think of the gramophone wedded to the thin sweet singing of the olive leaves in the evening wind; to remember the scent of his rank cigar marrying with this wild incense; to read that enchanted name, Inn of Tranquillity, and hear the bland and affable remark of the gentleman who owned it—such were, indeed, phenomena to stimulate souls to speculation. And all unconsciously one began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of existence—the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age, wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man's spirit till sometimes he is ready to cry out: Rather than live where such things can be, let me die!

      Like a wild bird tracking through the air, one's meditation wandered on, following that trail of thought, till the chance encounter became spiritually luminous. That Italian gentleman of the world, with his bowler hat, his skittle-alley, his gramophone, who had planted himself down in this temple of wild harmony, was he not Progress itself—the blind figure with the stomach full of new meats and the brain of raw notions? Was he not the very embodiment of the wonderful child, Civilisation, so possessed by a new toy each day that she has no time to master its use—naive creature lost amid her own discoveries! Was he not the very symbol of that which was making economists thin, thinkers pale, artists haggard, statesmen bald—the symbol of Indigestion Incarnate! Did he not, delicious, gross, unconscious man, personify beneath his Americo-Italian polish all those rank and primitive instincts, whose satisfaction necessitated the million miseries of his fellows; all those thick rapacities which stir the hatred of the humane and thin-skinned! And yet, one's meditation could not stop there—it was not convenient to the heart!

      A little above us, among the olive-trees, two blue-clothed peasants, man and woman, were gathering the fruit—from some such couple, no doubt, our friend in the bowler hat had sprung; more virile and adventurous than his brothers, he had not stayed in the home groves, but had gone forth to drink the waters of hustle and commerce, and come back—what he was. And he, in turn, would beget children, and having made his pile out of his 'Anglo-American hotel' would place those children beyond the coarser influences of life, till they became, perhaps, even as our selves, the salt of the earth, and despised him. And I thought: I do not despise those peasants—far from it. I do not despise myself—no more than reason; why, then, despise my friend in the bowler hat, who is, after all, but the necessary link between them and me? I did not despise the olive-trees, the warm sun, the pine scent, all those material things which had made him so thick and strong; I did not despise the golden, tenuous imaginings which the trees and rocks and sea were starting in my own spirit. Why, then, despise the skittle-alley, the gramophone, those expressions of the spirit of my friend in the billy-cock hat? To despise them was ridiculous!

      And suddenly I was visited by a sensation only to be described as a sort of smiling certainty, emanating from, and, as it were, still tingling within every nerve of myself, but yet vibrating harmoniously with the world around. It was as if I had suddenly seen what was the truth of things; not perhaps to anybody else, but at all events to me. And I felt at once tranquil and elated, as when something is met with which rouses and fascinates in a man all his faculties.

      For, I thought, if it is ridiculous in me to despise my friend —that perfect marvel of disharmony—it is ridiculous in me to despise anything. If he is a little bit of continuity, as perfectly logical an expression of a necessary phase or mood of existence as I myself am, then, surely, there is nothing in all the world that is not a little bit of continuity, the expression of a little necessary mood. Yes, I thought, he and I, and those olive-trees, and this spider on my hand, and everything in the Universe which has an individual shape, are all fit expressions of the separate moods of a great underlying Mood or Principle, which must be perfectly adjusted, volving and revolving on itself. For if It did not volve and revolve on Itself, It would peter out at one end or the other, and the image of this petering out no man with his mental apparatus can conceive. Therefore, one must conclude It to be perfectly adjusted and everlasting. But if It is perfectly adjusted and everlasting, we are all little bits of continuity, and if we are all little bits of continuity it is ridiculous for one of us to despise another. So, I thought, I have now proved it from my friend in the billy-cock hat up to the Universe, and from the Universe down, back again to my friend.

      And I lay on my back and looked at the sky. It seemed friendly to my thought with its smile, and few white clouds, saffron-tinged like the plumes of a white duck in sunlight. And yet, I wondered, though my friend and I may be equally necessary, I am certainly irritated by him, and shall as certainly continue to be irritated, not only by him, but by a thousand other men and so, with a light heart, you may go on being irritated with your friend in the bowler hat, you may go on loving those peasants and this sky and sea. But, since you have this theory of life, you may not despise any one or any thing, not even a skittle-alley, for they are all threaded to you, and to despise them would be to blaspheme against continuity, and to blaspheme against continuity would be to deny Eternity. Love you cannot help, and hate you cannot help; but contempt is—for you—the sovereign idiocy, the irreligious fancy!

      There was a bee weighing down a blossom of thyme close by, and underneath the stalk a very ugly little centipede. The wild bee, with his little dark body and his busy bear's legs, was lovely to me, and the creepy centipede gave me shudderings; but it was a pleasant thing to feel so sure that he, no less than the bee, was a little mood expressing himself out in harmony with Designs tiny thread on the miraculous quilt. And I looked at him with a sudden zest and curiosity; it seemed to me that in the mystery of his queer little creepings I was enjoying the Supreme Mystery; and I thought: If I knew all about that wriggling beast, then, indeed, I might despise him; but, truly, if I knew all about him I should know all about everything—Mystery would be gone, and I could not bear to live!

      So I stirred him with my finger and he went away.

      But how—I thought about such as do not feel it ridiculous to despise; how about those whose temperaments and religions show them all things so plainly that they know they are right and others wrong? They must be in a bad way! And for some seconds I felt sorry for them, and was discouraged. But then I thought: Not at all —obviously not! For if they do not find it ridiculous to feel contempt, they are perfectly right to feel contempt, it being natural to them; and you have no business to be sorry for them, for that is, after all, only your euphemism for contempt. They are all right, being the expressions of contemptuous moods, having religions and so forth, suitable to these moods; and the religion of your mood would be Greek to them, and probably a matter for contempt. But this only makes it the more interesting. For though to you, for instance, it may seem impossible to worship Mystery with one lobe of the brain, and with the other to explain it, the thought that this may not seem impossible to others should not discourage you; it is but another little piece of that Mystery which makes life so wonderful and sweet.

      The sun, fallen now almost to the level of the cliff, was slanting upward on to the burnt-red pine boughs, which had taken to themselves a quaint resemblance to the great brown limbs of the wild men Titian drew in his pagan pictures, and down below us the sea-nymphs, still swimming to shore, seemed eager to embrace them in the enchanted groves. All was fused in that golden glow of the sun going down-sea and land gathered into one transcendent mood of light and colour, as if Mystery desired to bless us by showing how perfect was that worshipful adjustment, whose secret we could never know. And I said to myself: None of those thoughts of yours are new, and in a vague way even you have thought them before; but all the same, they have given you some little feeling of tranquillity.

      And at that word of fear I rose and invited my companion to return toward the town. But as we stealthy crept by the Osteria di Tranquillita, our friend in the bowler hat came out with a gun over his shoulder and waved his hand toward the Inn.

      You come again in two week—I change all that! And now, he added, I go to shoot little bird or two, and he disappeared into the golden haze under the olive-trees.

      A minute later we heard his gun go off, and returned homeward with a prayer.

      1910.

      MAGPIE OVER THE HILL

      Table of Contents

      I lay often that summer on a slope of sand and coarse grass, close to the Cornish sea, trying to catch thoughts; and I was trying very hard when I saw them coming hand in hand.

      She was dressed in blue linen, and a little cloud of honey-coloured hair; her small face had serious eyes the colour of the chicory flowers she was holding up to sniff at—a clean sober little maid, with a very touching upward look of trust. Her companion was a strong, active boy of perhaps fourteen, and he, too, was serious—his deep-set, blacklashed eyes looked down at her with a queer protective wonder; the while he explained in a soft voice broken up between two ages, that exact process which bees adopt to draw honey out of flowers. Once or twice this hoarse but charming voice became quite fervent, when she had evidently failed to follow; it was as if he would have been impatient, only he knew he must not, because she was a lady and younger than himself, and he loved her.

      They sat down just below my nook, and began to count the petals of a chicory flower, and slowly she nestled in to him, and he put his arm round her. Never did I see such sedate, sweet lovering, so trusting on her part, so guardianlike on his. They were like, in miniature —-though more dewy,—those sober couples who have long lived together, yet whom one still catches looking at each other with confidential tenderness, and in whom, one feels, passion is atrophied from never having been in use.

      Long I sat watching them in their cool communion, half-embraced, talking a little, smiling a little, never once kissing. They did not seem shy of that; it was rather as if they were too much each other's to think of such a thing. And then her head slid lower and lower down his shoulder, and sleep buttoned the lids over those chicory-blue eyes. How careful he was, then, not to wake her, though I could see his arm was getting stiff! He still sat, good as gold, holding her, till it began quite to hurt me to see his shoulder thus in chancery. But presently I saw him draw his arm away ever so carefully, lay her head down on the grass, and lean forward to stare at something. Straight in front of them was a magpie, balancing itself on a stripped twig of thorn-tree. The agitating bird, painted of night and day, was making a queer noise and flirting one wing, as if trying to attract attention. Rising from the twig, it circled, vivid and stealthy, twice round the tree, and flew to another a dozen paces off. The boy rose; he looked at his little mate, looked at the bird, and began quietly to move toward it; but uttering again its queer call, the bird glided on to a third thorn-tree. The boy hesitated then—but once more the bird flew on, and suddenly dipped over the hill. I saw the boy break into a run; and getting up quickly, I ran too.

      When I reached the crest there was the black and white bird flying low into a dell, and there the boy, with hair streaming back, was rushing helter-skelter down the hill. He reached the bottom and vanished into the dell. I, too, ran down the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1