The Burning Spear

John Galsworthy won a Nobel Prize in literature in 1932. He is best known for writing the Forsyte Saga. His first published play was The Silver Box. In 1890 Galsworthy was called to the bar but not interested in practicing law he began traveling abroad caring for his family's shipping business. Galsworthy campaigned for various social causes in his writing, including prison reform, censorship issues, women's rights, and the rights of animals. The Burning Spear is a satirical attack on war. The story opens, "In the year ---- there dwelt on Hampstead Heath a small thin gentleman of fifty-eight, gentle disposition, and independent means, whose wits had become somewhat addled from reading the writings and speeches of public men. The castle, which like every Englishman, he inhabited was embedded in lilac bushes and laburnums, and was attached to another castle, embedded, in deference to our national dislike of uniformity, in acacias and laurustinus. Our gentleman, whose name was John Lavender, had until the days of the Great War passed one of those curious existences are sometimes to be met with, in doing harm to nobody. He had been brought up to the Bar, but like most barristers had never practiced, and had spent his time among animals and the wisdom of the past."