John Galsworthy

31:4 Book Reviews world which provided his Paterian impressions. Beckson notes this sense as early as Symons's visit to Sligo with Yeats in 1896 (149-50) and finds traces of it in poems, essays, and fiction which Symons wrote from that time until his madness (152, 178, 202, 222, 231, 299). Beckson does not seem to draw an explanatory conclusion from the body of this evidence as a whole, however, and finishes his summary of Symons's concept of art as a '"sacred ritual'" in The Symbolist Movement with the comment that "the 'Conclusion' of the book is curiously preoccupied with the Decadent/ Symbolist fear of death" (197). In an essay on Symons in Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (1965), Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi finds Symons's sense of transience to be a central theme in his work, along with a religious and Freudian fear of women and sex (Gelpi, 108-19). It may be, in fact, that his fears— presuming that he had them—of sexual and strong women were subsumed in his sense of transience and his powerlessness before it despite the ability he ascribed to art's "sacred ritual" to transcend the fluxes of passion and material change. Probably the decisive answer to the question of why Symons went mad is still to be found in his literary works of the ten years or so prior to his collapse— works such as Spiritual Adventures (1905)—if a decisive answer is to be found at all. It should be noted that Arthur Symons: A Life is not a psychobiography although it is heavily embroidered with psychological terms and comments—caveat emptor. The book is a chronological account of Symons's life based mainly on his correspondence and other writing and does not seem to have been conceived, as a whole, as a causal analysis of the psychological dynamics of his developing character. Usually, for example, his published works are discussed when the narrative reaches their publication dates and not at their dates of composition , when they would illuminate the progressive workings of his mind. The usual discussion of a published work notes its publication, its content and significance in one respect or another, and its critical reception. Because Professor Beckson's book is organized as a chronicle rather than as a psychological analysis, its psychological comments often lack broad analytical support and, in their diversity and tentativeness, become diffuse and sometimes unconvincing. As a chronicle, Arthur Symons: A Life is a rich, scholarly, and very impressive book. Alan Johnson Arizona State University JOHN GALSWORTHY James Gindin. John Galsworthy's Life and Art: An Alien's Fortress. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. $29.95 John Galsworthy's public persona as a civic-minded literary figure impressed itself so firmly upon the age in which he lived that even today the other motivations behind his art are seldom suspected. James Gindin's definitive work on the life and letters of Galsworthy, however, reconstructs the building 455 31:4 Book Reviews of the public edifice and uncovers the private man behind its walls. Gindin eventually reveals not one but three John Galsworthys, and assesses their relevance to the prose, fiction and drama that constitute Galsworthy's oeuvre. Gindin's book, the most comprehensive on Galsworthy to date, presents careful research in a lucid prose style that makes the words he himself applies to Galsworthy's chronicles appropriate to his own treatment of Galsworthy's life and art: "sufficiently various and vast, as well as sufficiently appropriate in particular detail" (455). The causes Galsworthy championed, as well as the plays, books and articles he wrote, defined his public persona—Gindin's first and the historically foremost John Galsworthy. In actuality, Galsworthy wrote a significant portion of his work to draw attention to a particular condition in need of reform or to raise money in support of some project. From this perspective, Justice was the most successful of his artistic endeavors. The play was instrumental in bringing about a reduction in the terms of solitary confinement. During the war Galsworthy wrote compulsively, contributing his profits to various relief agencies. He continued throughout his life to lend his...