average instead of his low-water mark, his position as a novelist would
be negligible. But his other novels, without exception, are so superior
in technique, in human interest, in beauty, and in force, that we cannot
consider _The Island Pharisees_ as anything but the first uncertain step
of one who is feeling his way. In _The Man of Property_ we have the same
idea—the satire of a class—but it is brought before us so differently
that comparison is impossible.
The Forsyte family are representatives of that section of the middle
class whose chief aim is Possession. The Forsytes possess many
things—they possess money, they possess artistic treasures, houses,
wives, and children, they even possess talents; but with them the verb
“I have” is of more importance than its object. “This interests me, not
in itself, but because it is mine”—is their motto. In many ways they are
less heartless, less hypocritical than the country Pharisees; the
consciousness of possession brings a certain stamina, a worth and
solidarity, which compel admiration. Also Galsworthy has been far more
tolerant in their portrayal. The Forsytes are human, they are not like
the Dennants; they are undoubtedly types, even their differentiations
are typical, but they are types of flesh and blood, not merely of points
of view. There is something in the grouping of them too which is
impressive. These six old brothers whose god is property have a certain
greatness; though they and their lust of possession are satirised in
many telling episodes, we feel that nevertheless the nation would do
badly without them.
The chief representative of Forsytism belongs, however, to one of the
younger branches of the family. Soames Forsyte is essentially the Man of
Property, because we see the lust of possession working in him not only
through the splendid house he is building, but through his wife Irene.
It is in his attitude towards Irene that he declares himself most
definitely the Man of Property. He is not unkind to her, he is not
untrue to her, but she is his in the sense that the Robin Hill house is
his, and it is this realisation which fills her with bitterness and
loathing.
Irene belongs to the contrasting group which Galsworthy uses in his
novels as in his plays. She and her lover Bosinney stand for all that is
antagonistic to the Forsytes. In many ways Irene is one of Galsworthy’s
most vivid creations. She is a type we meet elsewhere in the novels, yet
she has about her certain elements of originality. Something individual
creeps into the magnetic softness, the passion-haunted quietness, which
are characteristic of so many Galsworthy women. She is human, and she is
in revolt—but not strenuously or effectively. Galsworthy has little
sympathy for the strong successful woman, who either defeats
circumstances or handles them with capable cunning. In his delineation
of June Forsyte, who belongs to this class, he is sometimes reluctantly
admiring, but never sympathetic.
June Forsyte, with her decided chin and managing ways, is the antithesis
of Irene, strong only in her softness. It is easy to understand how this
very contrast would have switched Bosinney’s love from one to the other,
but the change itself is not very convincingly brought about. Perhaps
this is partly due to the fact that Bosinney himself is not a success.
He is the representative of the contrast group; property to him is
nothing, he spends his time and talent—in the end risking his career—on
the house which is Soames Forsyte’s. On the other hand, it is his sudden
knowledge that another also owns the woman of whom he had thought
himself the sole possessor that drives him to madness and suicide.
Property makes its appeal even to him.
There is throughout the book a depth of gloom, as if the shadows of
great possessions lay over it. None of the characters is really
attractive, except, perhaps, old Jolyon Forsyte; there is something
subtly caddish about them all, and the author’s lack of sympathy sours
the whole. Studied in the light especially of his novels, it is a
strange error to call Galsworthy “detached.” The side he takes is always
apparent, in spite of what he says on the other, and his lack of
sympathy with the human representatives of the opposite point of view is
often so great as to put them out of drawing. Fine as the Forsytes are,
they would have been much finer if the author had penetrated in some
degree beneath their outer skin, shown sympathy with the springs of
their nature as well as understanding of their mental attitude. His
sympathies in _The Man of Property_ are undoubtedly with Irene Forsyte
and with Bosinney—though it would seem that this character sometimes
repelled and baffled even his creator.
On the whole there is something haunting about the book—something in the
gloom of its ending which makes us shudder after it is closed. Property
triumphs. Bosinney is beaten and killed by the Man of Property, and
Irene is brought back to the slavery from which she revolted.
“Huddled in her grey fur against the sofa-cushions, she had a strange
resemblance to a captive owl, bunched in its soft feathers against the
wires of a cage. The supple erectness of her figure was gone, as
though she had been broken by cruel exercise; as though there were no
longer any reason for being beautiful, and supple, and erect.”
Thus the curtain rings down on Irene Forsyte, crushed under the heel of
prosperity, robbed of her love by a sudden awakening of the sense of
property in the heart of the man she had thought clean of it....
_The Country House_ also deals with a class, and it is the country
equivalent of the Forsytes. The Pendyces are big country proprietors,
but the property is to them a good deal more than material possession.
It is their Position in the county that they think of, their Standing;
Dignity is with them almost as important as Land, and more important
than Money. Also they are not quite so much a type as the Forsytes—in
certain broad characteristics they may be found in dozens of country
manors, but in others they are unique. They do everything with the
greatest amount of unnecessary trouble to themselves and other people.
“Pendyce,” says Paramor to Vigil, when discussing the threatened
divorce, “he’d give his eyes for the case not to come on, but you’ll see
he’ll rub everything up the wrong way, and it’ll be a miracle if we
succeed. That’s ’Pendycitis’!”
Even George, who in some ways breaks free from the family tradition, is
afflicted by it. It is largely owing to Pendycitis that he loses Helen
Bellew. He tires her with that dogged quality of his, which spares
neither himself nor her, but sends him plodding and muddling on in the
face of impossible circumstances. He cannot yield, and he is not really
strong—he is a Pendyce; and it is with luxurious relief that she finds
herself free of him at last.
Helen Bellew is only lightly sketched in, her presence is almost always
merely physical. She has many of the outward essentials of the
Galsworthy heroine, that particular dower of ripe, seductive, yet
delicate, beauty which we find in Irene Forsyte, Audrey Noel, and Olive
Cramier. But she is heartless—which those others are not—and hence we
seem to find a certain reluctance on the author’s part to probe into
her. What is heartless cannot be truly beautiful, according to his
creed, and he wants us to realise how beautiful Helen Bellew was, so
that she became a force, a moulding-stamp, to the hard, unimpressionable
George Pendyce.
The real heroine of _The Country House_ is George’s mother, Margery
Pendyce, and she is, practically without exception, the most charming
character in Galsworthy’s novels. She is the Mother—not the Mother in
her elemental form, but the Mother as civilisation and education and
pain have made her; not very different from the primitive type, perhaps,
but dainty with a score of sweet refinements. Quieted by her long
subjection in the school of Pendyce, she yet has the invincible courage
of gentleness; accustomed for years to yield where her own comfort and
happiness only are concerned, she takes an impregnable stand at last
when her children’s welfare is at stake. There is something heroic in
this gentle, soft-gowned, lavender-scented figure, moving so peacefully
among her roses, caring so dutifully for her household and her husband,
and then suddenly putting them all from her, to take her place beside
her outcast son.
“I have gone up to London to be with George” (she writes simply to
Pendyce), “you will remember what I said last night. Perhaps you did
not quite realise that I meant it. Take care of poor old Roy, and
don’t let them give him too much meat this hot weather. Jackman knows
better than Ellis how to manage the roses. Please do not worry about
me. Good-bye, dear Horace; I am sorry if I grieve you.”
Margery Pendyce is the chief of the contrast group in this novel; with
her is Gregory Vigil, the idealist, who looks at the sky when it would
be better if he looked at the street and saw where he was going.
Unselfishness, quietness, and idealism are the contrasts of Pendycitis.
The Reverend Hussell Barter, who is a kind of clerical Pendyce, is one
of Galsworthy’s most successful attempts at humour. He is drawn with
many a memorable satiric flick, and doubtless this is a reason why he
succeeds, for Galsworthy’s humour without irony is apt to be trivial.
Another striking character is the Spaniel John—here Galsworthy has
succeeded in giving a dog a very definite personality. John is not only
a dog, he is a spaniel—the distinct psychology of the spaniel works in
him, and we could never think of him as a terrier or a collie. Indeed
the author has taken as much trouble over the Spaniel John as over any
character in the book, and been as successful.
THE NOVELS
II
One can say without much fear of contradiction that after _The Man of
Property_ the finest of Galsworthy’s novels is _Fraternity_. Indeed it
comes as near being a perfect work of art as any novel ever written.
There have been many novels with a stronger appeal, a wider
comprehension, a greater depth and force, but few of which it can be
said that they fulfil more completely the canons of novel-writing. And
this is to be understood not only of the letter but of the
spirit—_Fraternity_ is no mere triumph of technique, it is a moving,
human and beautiful story, about people who are real, if drawn in pale
colours, and situations which are Life, in spite of their elusiveness.
In its perfection of balance, _Fraternity_ reminds one of the plays.
There is a central situation, flanked by two contrasting groups. It is
not of mere industrial or moral significance, nor is it the satirisation
of any particular class; it is a problem which has always occupied human
minds, and will do so till the end of time—the problem of the rich and
the poor. It is embodied in old Mr Stone, with his great unfinished—and,
we suspect, ever to be unfinished—work on Brotherhood. “Each one of us
has a shadow in those places—in those streets.” Mr Stone is one of
Galsworthy’s finest achievements. In him the author shows what few have
even attempted to show, the infinite pathos of moral greatness. There is
no denying the greatness of Mr Stone, in spite of his mental kink, and
his pathos is as evident. He is alone, it is his own doing; he cannot,
if he would, bind himself up with others. He writes of Fraternity, but
in life he never touches a brother’s hand—he does nothing to unite those
two brothers whose embrace he writes of, and his own life is equally
remote from either. They come near him, they put out tentative,
appealing hands—and with a wistful sigh he turns to his book.
The Classes are represented by the two Dallison families, the Masses by
the Hughes, Creed, and the little model. It is remarkable how tightly
the whole fabric is drawn together—Hilary and Stephen Dallison have
married two sisters, Bianca and Cecilia, and their Shadows live together
under the same roof. We know what would be, with an average novelist,
the result of such an effort at concentration, but nothing could be more
natural, more inevitable, than the knitting up of these groups.
The little model is not a common Galsworthy type; in fact, she stands
almost alone in his novels. Quiet and soft she undoubtedly is, like most
of his women, but the meek vulgarity of her little mind is something
new. She is drawn with a wonderful sympathy, as indeed are all the
characters in the book; for in _Fraternity_, Galsworthy does not seem to
have been so much struck by the irony of his theme as by its pathos.
There is one beautiful account of her, leaving Hilary’s house, which
sheds a tender light like a spring sunset over her figure, making it at
once terribly pathetic and terribly young.
“She kept turning her face back as she went down the path, as though
to show her gratitude. And presently, looking up from his manuscript,
he saw her face still at the railings, peering through a lilac bush.
Suddenly she skipped, like a child let out of school. Hilary got up,
perturbed. The sight of that skipping was like the rays of a lantern
turned on the dark street of another human being’s life. It revealed,
as in a flash, the loneliness of this child, without money and without
friends, in the midst of this great town.”
The Hughes group is in its units to be found in many of Galsworthy’s
works: the bullying husband, gross, selfish, an animal—but an animal
broken—the meek wife who complains and nags, but has at the bottom of
her heart an unreasoning dog-like quality which will let her make no
effective efforts for freedom; the poor old man, fallen on evil days,
yet with a philosophy, and a self-respect which is almost pride.
Galsworthy never sees the poor and outcast in an aureole of false
idealism. If he sadly confesses that the classes do not know how to help
the masses, he also confesses that the masses do not know how to help
themselves. If the Dallisons are timid and inefficient, Hughes is an
undeserving brute, and Mrs Hughes a scold who is largely responsible for
her own ills. The little model is forlorn, but she is also designing.
The result is that an atmosphere of deep depression hangs over
_Fraternity_. One might say that its moral was “For rich is rich and
poor is poor, and never the twain shall meet”—except in the unfinished
book of a cranky idealist.
“Like flies caught among the impalpable and smoky threads of cobwebs,
so men struggle in the webs of their own natures, giving here a start,
there a pitiful small jerking, long sustained, and falling into
stillness. Enmeshed they were born, enmeshed they die, fighting
according to their strength to the end; to fight in the hope of
freedom, their joy; to die, not knowing they are beaten, their
reward.”
_The Patrician_ is scarcely equal to _Fraternity_. In it the bitterness,
which seemed to have slumbered for a while, awakes, and helps to distort
the picture. Also in no novel, I think, is more obvious Galsworthy’s
lack of sympathy with certain of his characters. The book suffers in
having for its central figure a man whom the author admires but does not
really understand. Lord Miltoun is a noble conception, but Galsworthy
does not get to the bottom of his struggle. One feels all the way
through that he admires him, but cannot sympathise with him, and the
result is that the real grounds of Miltoun’s actions are seldom
displayed. We never penetrate beneath the surface of this character,
whose inner mind we nevertheless would know rather than many whose
workings are shown us.
There is also a group, the Valleys group, whom Galsworthy is
passionately wanting to treat fairly, but for whom he cannot conceal a
bitterness not unflavoured with contempt. Lord Valleys, his wife, his
sons, his daughters, are drawn with a painstaking effort to hide his
real feeling towards them, but the effort often breaks down; even
Barbara, splendid and brave, has a repelling hardness in which stick one
or two ironic arrows of her creator. Courtier, who represents the Other
Point of View, is sometimes rather vaguely drawn, and suffers in the
opposite way to Miltoun, for Galsworthy, while apparently sympathising
with his attitude, does not seem to have the same admiration for his
character.
The only person in the book who is both admired and understood is Mrs
Noel. Here we have a very appealing figure, tragic yet quiet, courageous
yet soft, made for love, vibrant with passion, full of an infinite
delicacy and self-respect. Self-respect is an unfailing characteristic
of Galsworthy’s good women; he has no sympathy with the woman who in
times of stress loses her personal dignity, and forgets all those little
trivial refinements of body which are part of her greatness. Audrey Noel
“incorrigibly loved to look as charming as she could; and even if no one
were going to see her, she never felt that she looked charming enough.”
He realises that for a woman who respects herself it is not enough to be
merely clean and tidy, she must be as beautiful as circumstances will
allow—it is not vanity but her dignity which demands it. Mrs Noel
appeals because her courage is so infinite, and because it is so
essentially a woman’s courage, a thing of gentleness and soft endurance,
not of the stiff but of the smiling lip.
There is a certain unsatisfactoriness in the tragedy of her relations
with Miltoun. He falls from his ideal, but only half-way, so to
speak—the rest of his difficulty is solved by her abnegation. One is
given the impression, in spite of much talking between the characters,
that the vital heart of the matter has never been reached. “If the
lark’s song means nothing—if that sky is a morass of our invention—if we
are pettily creeping on, furthering nothing—persuade me of it, and I’ll
bless you.” That desperate cry of Miltoun seems to give more of the
essence of his struggle than any arguments about Religion and Authority.
One feels that both were only names on lips—it was not merely a respect
for authority that made Miltoun first deny himself Audrey, and then when
he had taken her, believe himself bound to throw aside his public life.
The appeal of Authority is not made convincing enough, the appeal to
Religion not spiritual enough, for a man of Miltoun’s type—one sees him
acting, generally at least, according to the dead letter of both; one
knows there must have been a quickening spirit behind to drive such a
man, but one is not shown it.
_The Dark Flower_ is in some ways a departure from his usual methods. It
lacks the central problem, with its balanced and contrasted groups. It
is not a study of a situation nor of a class; it is a study of passion.
There has always been plenty of passion in Galsworthy’s books; he is not
a cold writer, and though his central idea is often social or
intellectual, in his treatment of it he never loses sight of the fact
that human emotions are stronger than human intellects, and play a more
important part in all situations, no matter how purely technical and
general these may appear. But in _The Dark Flower_, passion is not an
incident or a moulding force, it is the central theme. We are shown its
growth in three different stages—its first kindling in the heart of a
boy, its consummation in the young man and woman, its last flicker in
the man who sees old age approaching and to whom youth calls.
To carry out his idea Galsworthy is forced to put aside much of that
compactness which is so effective in his other novels. Indeed _The Dark
Flower_ is really three separate stories, of which the hero, Mark
Lennan, is the connecting link. A really fine character might have held
these three episodes together, but Lennan is vaguely drawn. He is most
convincing as boy and middle-aged man; in the central part he is swamped
in the vehemence of his own love. Indeed the passion of Lennan and Olive
Cramier is far the greatest thing about them—taken apart from it they
are both a little colourless. Olive is much less life-like than Audrey
Noel, Irene Forsyte, and others of her kind; she is vague and shadowy
beside the heroines of the two other episodes, Anne Stormer and Nell
Dromore.
These women are in many ways the best-drawn characters in the book. Anne
Stormer, caught on the fringe of middle age by the gust of her passion
for a boy of eighteen, swept by it, rocked by it, but conscious all the
time of its hopelessness with regard to herself, its cruelty with regard
to him, in the end gives him up to the little girl of his own age, with
whom he climbs trees, and in whose presence he forgets the dark flower
whose scent in her bosom had given him his first staggering draught of
life. She is a character fine through her pathos, through the
inevitableness of her renunciation, which is not made from any high
spirit of courage or self-sacrifice, but simply because she must.
Very different is Nell Dromore, who sends the mocking cry of youth after
Lennan when, having passed through the storm of his love for Olive
Cramier, and married his boyhood’s playfellow, Sylvia Doone, he sees old
age creeping towards him, passionless and adventureless. She is an
extraordinary study of mingled abandonment and innocence. She leads him
on by methods which would not disgrace a courtesan if they had not about
them all the delicious shamelessness of a child. In the end he has the
strength to wrench himself from her, knowing that she brings him but a
false hope, for which his wife’s broken heart must pay. Sylvia, though
winning and sweet in the first episode, is rather shadowy here, where
she has such an important part. No doubt her ineffectiveness is to a
certain extent deliberate, but for all that it should not be unreal, or
we lose sight of it as a force in Lennan’s struggle.
On the whole it must be said that Galsworthy is at his best when most
characteristic, and here, where he turns to the methods of the more
ordinary novelist, he loses some of his strength. There are, however,
some impressive scenes in the book, and he has again shown his peculiar
successfulness in dealing with youth and young love. There are
delightful pictures of the boy Mark, in which his growing,
half-understood infatuation is never allowed to drown the frankness of
his youth; and the scenes between him and Sylvia remind us of similar
scenes in _Joy_.
In _The Freelands_, Galsworthy reverts to the more characteristic mood;
indeed the book is reminiscent—in a stimulating, legitimate way. Its
structure reminds one of _The Man of Property_, and its environment of
_The Country House_. As in the first of these the web was spun over the
framework of the six brothers Forsyte, so here we have the four brothers
Freeland to serve as pegs—and they live in circumstances that recall the
Pendyces and their problems. Not that they are all four country
people—Felix is a successful author and lives at Hampstead, and John is
in the Home Office; but the family meets at Becket, where Stanley who
has made a fortune by exporting ploughs, has an estate, and Tod, the
eccentric and revolutionary, lives the simple life, freehold.
Then there is the old mother, one of those tender, sturdy, odd
patricians whom the author can draw so clearly, and there is the young
generation as represented by Nedda, Felix’s inquiring daughter, and
Tod’s anarchistic Derek and Sheila—also the wives of three Freelands,
especially Tod’s Kirsteen.
These characters are not considered so much in relation to each other as
in relation to the central problem, which is The Land—and The Land with
Galsworthy is, of course, not the good earth but the slaves that toil on
it. He studies the labouring man in connection with his employers, the
petty tyrannies of Manor, Parsonage, and Farm. Bob Tryst is evicted
because his marriage with his deceased wife’s sister displeases the
Squiress, Lady Malloring, and the poor Gaunts are hounded from pillar to
post because the daughter has “got into trouble.” Galsworthy pillories
Feudalism, which he sees rampant over English rusticity, and parts of
_The Freelands_ read like a Gladstone League pamphlet.