The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/The Right to Believe

The Right to Believe
The Mob, a play in four acts, by John Galsworthy. New York: Charles Scriber's Sons. 60 cents net.

MANY gallant creations have come from Mr. Galsworthy, but none deeper or more poignant than "The Mob." For a time Mr. Galsworthy seemed diverted. "The Pigeon" and "The Eldest Son" were characteristic, but they were slighter than seemed warranted by his powers. In this recent drama, however, (produced on the English stage last March and now published for the habituated reader of plays), he returns to a larger, more inclusive world. There is, moreover a change in mental temper. No longer does he blindfold himself and his reader to hold his scales impartially. He stands squarely before a common moral issue, and, while still reticent, commits himself as never before.

The beauty of courage has always stirred the soul of Mr. Galsworthy. There is a drama of the beauty of courage. By accident it relates to war, and since war is uppermost in people's minds perhaps the accident is happy. Mr. Galsworthy could not, in point of time, have calculated to help our groping sympathies, but because he adverts to the sharp problem of public action and private conscience his drama responds to the cue of the hour.

A British imperial exigency creates the situation in "The Mob." Several British subjects have been murdered by the natives of a powerful country, presumably in Africa. Feeling runs high in England and the idea of a war is popular. The government of the day is impressed with the feeling. It is ready to accede to the newspapers and the belligerent patriots, and to send its soldiers to the front. One member of the government, however, Stephen More, the Under Secretary of State, realizes it is the typical device of Empire, the petty war of aggression. He loves his country, but he believes the great powers have got to change their ways in dealing with weaker nations. He is unalterably convinced against the war. In the teeth of an outbreak of actual frontier fighting, he goes straight to the House, to denounce the government's action, "agreeable to the blind moment, odious to the future." Greeted with anger, he is physically assaulted before he finishes, and is left with no course but to resign.

Such moral protests are not unusual in politics. They are generally regarded as creditable, though impractical. But in More's case a flag has been not lowered but raised. He is a man of forty, "with a fine-cut face, a rather charming smile, and the eyes of an idealist." The son-in-law of an old soldier, Sir John Julian, his friends are members of the ruling caste. Yet, in spite of the misunderstanding of them all, in spite of the wife's intense and passionate patriotism, he decides to stump the country. To everyone this seems madness; practically, in his wife's words, the action of a cur. His own constituents try to bend him. He falters, weakens, yearns to yield. But, when the first British reverses are followed by a savage burst of chauvinism, he holds to his need to speak his truth.

If Mr. Galsworthy manages in the first two acts to give one an extraordinarily vivid sense of every single human being introduced, it is nothing to the skill with which his next act captures the personality of a mean and angry mob. You realize from the forerunning acts More's inexplicable cause. His father-in-law thinks him a fanatic. His sister-in-law, with her husband at the front, is inevitably embittered. The editor who comes to see him demeans him as a political imbecile. The newspapers call him a degenerate. His servants begin to leave him. His wife, repelled by his inflexibility, turns to ice. His child, fresh from her nurse, asks: "What is an anti-patriot, stop-the-war one, Mummy?" With this behind him, he attempts to get his public hearing. He is greeted with jeers and laughs, hooted stoned, and spat on. Immovable, the crowd hates him. Unyielding, it sullenly "lets 'im be." It is a short scene, but vile, appalling and truthful. There is no mitigation in their hatred of one who speaks a new language; and he, understanding, speaks without one change.

In this hour of gall, More returns to see his wife. During his absence she has tasted the penalties of his ungrateful courage. The servants have poured in unwilling ears the verdict of the street. Much worse than this muttering of intolerance is her sister-in-law's morbid vision of the war. The girl has seen her soldier-husband dead, and More comes back to learn that "dream bad dreams, and wait, and hide oneself—there's been nothing else to do." In the pity and tenderness that surge in him at this recital, his wife attempts to make him cease his fight. "It shall be me—and everything." For a moment he takes her to him, then sees the pit beneath him, shrinks back, and stands away. "It is as if a cold and deadly shame had come to them both. Quite suddenly More turns, and, without looking back, feebly makes his way out of the room."

A less heartfelt drama might close with this enticement, but these people are human beings, interwoven by life. Before they see each other again the woman knows that, in truth, her brother is dead. When she does come, it is to part. It is then that More pays his price. "For God's sake," he begs, "put your pride away, and see. I'm fighting for the faith that is in me. What else can a man do? What else? Ah! Kit! Do see!" Her answer is the simplest. "I'm strangled here … I spent last night on the floor—thinking—and I know!"

Before the end, which comes to him as it came to Jaures, More swims for a moment in the black waters that are to engulf him. "Put him with the truth for once," he shouts to the invading mob. "You are the thing that pelts the weak; kicks women; howls down free speech." Other words leap flamingly, but a swift blow stops all.

An instant later Mr. Galsworthy, in a flash of most truthful ironic vision, shows the Aftermath in tableau. A peaceful sunny square, musical with birds: and there, silhouetted against the light, a monument erected to his memory. On the pedestal, engraved with beautiful unawareness, are the solemn words "Faithful to his Ideal."

There is, in "The Mob," a suggestion of moral preciosity. But, if one is tempted to believe that More made a gratuitous sacrifice of his life, one immediately thinks: "Sacrifice to what?" The answer comes sharply, sacrifice to a brute, a beast—the brute in all of us when we join the mob. "The Mob" says that, hard as steel.

It is easy, of course, to be sentimental about martyrs. Life is pragmatic, and to achieve one must compromise. But one cannot read "The Mob" without a stabling realization of the little infidelities of life. The mob itself, after all, is nothing. The instrument that tortured Stephen More, it is merely a symbol of our arcane friend, the World. If the navvy growled at More in the alley behind the theatre, he only rendered gutteral the suave accent of the editor of the Parthenon. It may seem unreal that every creature in the play, down to the wistfully ingenious daughter, should strip More of comforts and leave him "alone as the last man on earth." In points of fact, however, this is singularly true to life. When it comes to the trials of private conscience, every man is just as terribly alone as the soldier on the firing line, the woman in the ache of childbirth, the invalid in the icy clasp of death. Fortunate is man if, by lucky chance, his own and other consciences coincide But there is no promise that such will be the case. "The Mob" brings no comfort to the believer in human remissions, human concessions, human tolerances. Where it brings comfort is in its mordant confidence that, without courage of one's faith, one may not mould to the heart's desire.