from the Great World. After a midnight tryst in the apple orchard, they fell deeply in love. Charmed almost as much by her innocence as by the prospect of his own chivalry, Frank proposed that they elope together, to live, love, and perhaps finally marry in London. Megan acquiesced, and he departed for the nearby resort town of Torquay to procure money for the trip and a traveling wardrobe for his rustic beauty.

At Torquay, Frank encountered an old Rugby classmate, Halliday, and his sisters, Stella, Sabina, and Freda. In their company he enjoyed the ordinary holiday pleasures of the leisure class, exploring and sea bathing, taking tea, and making music. Soon the moonlit idyll in the orchard came to seem merely an interlude of vernal madness. In the company of the amiable Hallidays, particularly Stella, Ashurst’s conscience and class consciousness revived: He saw his intended elopement for what it would be, not romance but seduction: “It would only be a wild love-time, a troubled, remorseful, difficult time—and then—well, he would get tired, just because she gave him everything, was so simple, and so trustful, so dewy. And dew—wears off!” Resolving to do the decent thing, Frank never went back to claim and compromise the waiting Megan, and a year later he married Stella.

Although the young Ashurst may have rationalized his actions as unselfishness, now as a man twenty-six years older, he learns the lesson of the Hippolytus—that Love claims her victims despite human magnanimity. The grave on the moor, he discovers from an old laborer, is Megan’s. Unable to endure the loss of her love, she had drowned herself in the stream by the apple tree where they had met: “Spring, with its rush of passion, its flowers and song—the spring in his heart and Megan’s! Was it just Love seeking a victim!” Ironically, this man who half thinks himself too intense for the bread-and-butter love of married life must recognize that his own escape is due less to the strength of his “civilised” virtue than to the weakness of his “civilised” passion.

On Forsyte ’Change

Galsworthy wrote about his Forsytes, those pillars of Empire whose instincts for possession and property amounted to a kind of genius, in his short fiction as well as in The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy. The family first appears in the short piece “The Salvation of a Forsyte,” in which old Swithin, on his death bed, relives the one impulsively romantic interlude in his eminently practical bachelor’s life; and it furnishes the material for Galsworthy’s last completed book, On Forsyte ’Change, a collection of tales ranging from Aunt Ann’s recollection of her father, “Superior Dosset” Forsyte, under the reign of George IV, to “Soames and the Flag,” in which Galsworthy shows how his epitome of middle-class sense and honor reacted to World War I and the Armistice. Perhaps the most charming and substantial of the short Forsyte pieces is “The Indian Summer of a Forsyte,” a tale that brought the family back to life for their creator, just as the madeleine in lime-flower tea revived all Combray for Marcel Proust, and spurred Galsworthy on to write his sequels to the hitherto freestanding The Man of Property. This Forsyte interlude centers on old Jolyon, the most sympathetic of the brothers and a man patterned on Galsworthy’s own father. Like “The Apple Tree,” “The Indian Summer of a Forsyte” reveals Galsworthy’s love of the English countryside and his skill in portraying the aesthetic sensibility.

“The Indian Summer of a Forsyte”

As the story opens, old Jolyon, his family abroad, is spending the summer alone except for his granddaughter Holly at Robin Hill, the country house he bought from his nephew Soames when the wife of that “man of property” fled from their marriage. Although his body is not in the best of health, Jolyon’s fine spirit has mellowed with his eighty-four years. The orthodoxy of his class has fallen away, “leaving him reverent before three things alone—beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these was now beauty.” Jolyon’s quiet pleasures—the summer countryside, music, his cigars—are enhanced when beauty in woman’s form enters his life. Walking on his grounds, Jolyon encounters Irene, Soames’s runaway wife, who has come to commune with her memories of her dead lover, the architect who had designed Robin Hill. The old man and the young woman appreciate each other’s fineness, and a friendship emerges. So intensely, in fact, does Jolyon come to care for his niece by marriage that he decides to pay her a Forsyte’s supreme compliment: He will leave her a bequest. Although the old man’s spirit is rekindled by this radiant and mysterious woman’s presence in his life, his frail body is weakened by his excited anticipation of her visits and his journeys to London to treat her to dinner and the Opera. In letting this spiritual romance enter his contemplative life, old Jolyon finally and utterly transcends his Forsyte practicality:For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down.

Live on his capital old Jolyon does, however, until finally one drowsy and perfect summer day, he exhausts it. Expecting a visit from Irene, Jolyon dies quietly as he watches for beauty to cross his sunlit lawn: “Summer—summer—summer—the soundless footsteps in the grass!”

As susceptible to beauty as old Jolyon, Galsworthy could never quite bring himself to pay the high price of devotion, which in his case would have involved embracing artistic self-centeredness. Galsworthy was always too scrupulous in fulfilling his other obligations—giving Ada the personal attention and social success she needed, campaigning for decent treatment of his various “lame ducks,” churning out prose for the war effort—to fully cultivate his art as he would have liked. His judgment surpassed his performance; and despite the world’s acclaim, he felt a failure. Thus, his story “Spindleberries,” which presents the plight of an artist who, like Andrea Del Sarto, aims low and succeeds completely, is a window on Galsworthy’s own dissatisfied soul.

The story is a simple series of encounters between two painters, the celebrated Scudamore, “whose studies of Nature had been hung on the line for so many years that he had forgotten the days when, not yet in the Scudamore manner, they depended from the sky,” and his cousin, the eccentric Alicia. As the story opens, Alicia enters with a spray of dull pink spindleberries. “Charming! I’d like to use them!” Scudamore exclaims. Repelled by his pragmatism, she hurries contemptuously away. Alicia’s disapproval, and perhaps his own supressed agreement with her feeling, set Scudamore’s mind on a journey reliving other such encounters that proceed from spring to winter, from the cousins’ youth to late middle age. In each meeting, Scudamore endorses expedience: He is a Forsyte with a paint brush. Alicia, a female Don Quixote, perversely flings away every opportunity in her absolute devotion to beauty. She refuses Scudamore’s love; destroys her wondrous study of night—a creation Scudamore recognizes as far better than anything he or she has done before or ever will do—because any attempt to capture a summer night seems “blasphemy”; rejects a legacy that would mean comfort and security; and gazes at the stars in bitter weather until pneumonia prostrates her.

Scudamore pities the impractical Alicia: “A life spoiled! By what, if not by love of beauty? But who would ever have thought that the intangible could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame, of wealth, of health? And yet—by George—it had!” All the same, part of him whispers, perhaps her sacrifice has been worthwhile. Alicia has remained true to the pursuit from which worldly compromises have distracted him. She has refused to sell her vision and has not seen the world’s loveliness fade to the stuff of a transaction. “Who could say that she had missed the prize of life?” With a wistful sigh that must have been Galsworthy’s as well, Scudamore turns from this idealism so uncomfortable to contemplate. “And he set to work to paint in his celebrated manner—spindleberries.”