Justice: Galsworthy's Dramatic Tragedy

JUSTICE: GALSWORTHY'S DRAMATIC TRAGEDY WRITIEN IN THE SAME YEAR, 1909, John Galsworthy's "Some Platitudes Concerning Drama" and Justice may be said to function as complements ; and the article may conveniently be used to elucidate the play: "The Moral" is the keynote of all drama. That is to say, a drama must be shaped so as to have a spire of meaning. All human life and character have their inherent natural moral; and the business of the dramatist is so to pose the group as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of day. Such is the moral that exhales from plays like Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth. . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To the making of good drama, as to the practice of every other art, there must be brought an almost passionate love of discipline, a white heat of self-respect, a desire to make the truest, fairest, best thing in your power. And that to these must be added an eye that does not flinch. Such qualities alone will bring to a drama the selfless character which soaks it with inevitability and convinces its audience. • • • I • • • • • • • • • • • • The dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his design. In conception alone he is free.l Like the Shakespearean plays cited in the above quotation, Justice is a tragedy, the only Galsworthy play so designated. Now the regard implied in the label tragedy is all very well, bilt what is meant by it? It would seem that Galsworthy thought that Justice exhales the same moral that Shakespeare's tragedies do. Yet Falder is not grand in the way that Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth are. Nor by Galsworthy's own admission is Falder at the end of the play spiritually unbowed in the way that Lear and Hamlet and even some of Galsworthy's ostensibly defeated characters are.2 William Falder is pitiable, not tragic. This seems peculiarly unShakespearean. By insisting that the statement"Justice is a machine" be kept in mind while reading the play,3 Galsworthy was both pointing out the design of the play, which is the depiction of the complete process of justice, and suggesting the dimensions of its spire of meaning. The reason then that Falder is not truly tragic seems to be that the design and the spire of meaning demand that he be passive-not a giant struggling against inexorable fates but a weak man helplessly caught in the web of an intricate destiny. For as Galsworthy himself said: 768:'77~~hn Galsworthy, "Some Platitudes Concerning Drama," Atlantic Monthly, eN (1909), 2. John Galsworthy, The NODez", Tales and Plays, Devon Edition (New York, 1927), I, xi. 3. H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letttm of John Ga/sworthy (New York, 1936), p. 262. 138 1960 JUSTICE 139 It seems to me that you want to have the spectator feel: Thank Godl [Falder is] dead-and beyond that awful process going on for ever; out of the hands of men. Only by giving him back to Nature can you get the full criticism on human conduct.4 Quite naturally the design determines the division of the play into four acts: Act I, the discovery of the crime; Act II, the trial of the accused; Act III, the punishment of the criminal; Act IV, the aftereffects of the punishment. Naturally too this portrayal of the whole process of justice spans more than two and one-half years and presents a fairly long list of characters. Except for the victimized Falder and the sympathetic Cokeson (both of whom are prominent in each act) and Ruth Honeywill, the play has three distinct sets or groups of characters. In the first act James and Walter How constitute the law office group; in the second act the judge, Frome, and Cleaver comprise the court group; in the third act the governor, the doctor, and the chaplain make up the prison group; in the last act the first group returns, and the wheel is come full circle. Dreadfully in need of help in each act, Falder is a supplicant to these three groups. And tilese character groups are thus similar one to another: they are all responsible to justice in that they must administer the...