SOURCE: "'I'm Not Such a Fool as I Seem'," in John Galsworthy's Life and Art: An Alien's Fortress, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 114-52.

[Gindin is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he surveys the plots and major themes of Galsworthy's short stories.]

Galsworthy's first published fiction is difficult to take "seriously". Several of the stories in From the Four Winds centre around the character of Dick Denver, a vagabond adventurer, in Canada or the West Indies, who seems derived from a boys' weekly. One story, "The Spirit of the Karroo", recognizes the growing antagonism between the English and the Boers in South Africa, equating the English with generosity toward the natives and the Boers with an evil and cruelty finally avenged by the native spirit. Only a few years later, in another South African story, "On the Veldt", published in the Outlook, 30 December 1899, Galsworthy's version of the conflict between Englishman and Boer is no longer a simple struggle between good and evil. In the later story, neither Englishman nor Boer can understand the value in the simple black man who will not sell his soul for material advantage. The 1897 stories, however, all rely on cultural stereotypes in spite of the range of the geographical settings. The one most talked about in the reviews, and most connected with Kipling, the first story in the volume, "The Running Amok of Synge Sahib", has white men in the Fiji Islands on a hot tropical night telling stories. In the Conradian manner of narration within narration, like several of the other stories, one narrator tells of a half-black doctor who ran "amok" and held a knife over the speaker's baby, concluding that a buried strain of savagery exists within even apparently acculturated natives. In other stories, like "Tally Ho Bud mash", about a lost and incompetent Indian boy on the London Underground, the stereotypes are comic. More individually revealing than the use of cultural stereotypes, which Galsworthy questioned and abandoned within a few years, is the strain of noble character that runs through the stories. Doubtless the most unconvincing story in the volume is "The Capitulation of Jean Jacques", in which some escaped convicts in a French colony kidnap the colonial governor's four-year-old daughter, but return her unharmed when she becomes ill. Equally noble, the governor allows them to escape. In this melodramatically-written tale in a dark and exotic setting, all the characters talk alike, as if they were brought up within the same English conventions of polite consideration. The story that [Ford Madox] Ford and [Joseph] Conrad picked to admire most, "According to his Lights", is written with more restraint and less melodrama, but is also dependent on a noble gesture, a criminal returning money and securities to the uncle he intended to rob when he sees how feeble the old uncle is.

Galsworthy clearly was embarrassed by this volume of stories within a very short time. He never reprinted any of them, and he soon dropped the title from his list of publications. In the one copy he kept, he apparently, at some later time, went through the stories crossing out all the excess words. He excised a great many. After his death, Ada republished only one of the stories, "The Doldrums", in the volume Forsytes, Pendyces, and Others, of occasional and hitherto unpublished pieces that she put together. As she explained in her preface, the story "gives true and striking portraits of Conrad . . . and of the narrator, Galsworthy. . . . Neither had then any intention of taking Literature as a profession." The story takes place on a ship caught in the hot, sticky, tropical doldrums. At night, a group of Englishmen are on deck telling stories, joined by the mate with dark, almond-shaped "Slav" eyes. Several interior stories illustrate points of national difference, such as Chinese from European. Later, the doctor, a rather Chekhovian character, is found dead, perhaps an overdose of opium, perhaps just the heat. The mate draws the themes together, explaining that the cause of death can't be entirely known, that national identities can't be entirely assimilated, and that there is a time between life and death, between identities, that is a twilight, a calm and unidentifiable state, like the doldrums. Although somewhat derivative and overwritten, the story does hold together imagistically and is probably the only one in the volume that justifies reprinting.

Another characteristic visible in a number of the stories in From the Four Winds is an attitude of chivalry, of giving up or denying the self in order to protect the woman. Even the vagabond Dick Denver can be noble and self-sacrificing when a woman is involved, making his renunciation sound like a triumph. The last story in the volume, called "The Demi-Gods", can be read as a melodramatically falsified version of Galsworthy taking Ada away from his cousin Arthur, and the story has been praised as "the only story that really comes to life . . . in the collection" [Catherine Dup é, John Galsworthy, 1976]. In this story, the love affair is hopeless, prevented by the cruelty of prior marriage and circumstance. But the situation itself is left so vague and the emotions are so repetitiously and heavily elaborated that it reads like an endless litany of pain and self-denial. More effective, although apparently never published, is another story, written at about the same time by "John Sinjohn", entitled "Passing". In "Passing" (a title Galsworthy used later for a 1914 essay, totally unconnected), an observer overhears one sailor telling another the story of a man confronting his unfaithful wife. When she admits the infidelity, he throws her and her child out on the streets. The lover cannot help since he is off with his regiment. The layers of distance, the narrator thrice removed from his subject, palliate the effect of the story, but the prose is quicker, more spare, more controlled than any of the prose in From the Four Winds.

In his later recollections, Galsworthy viewed the stories much more as derivative literary exercises than as first approaches to his themes of chivalry or renunciation. An account of From the Four Winds and what happened to it provides almost the only light interlude in the 1932 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

From the title of that story [the first written], "Dick Denver's Idea", you can tell how much of it can be traced to the inspiration of Bret Harte and how much to the influence of Rudyard Kipling. For nearly two years that tale and its successors exhausted my literary afflatus, and my experience was not unlike that of the experimenting aviators of a decade back, who were always trying to leave the ground and always coming back to the ground with the greater regret. And yet—my conscience not having yet been born—I was more proud of the vile little body which bound those nine tales under the title of From the Four Winds than I was of any of its successors. In 1920, possessed by the desire to prevent anyone else from reading that dreadful little book, I wrote to the publisher. He had twenty copies left. Since they had no value he parted from them with I know not what alacrity. Tempted three years later by my bibliographer, I sold them to the firm of which he was a member for a hundred pounds. In the boom which followed they fetched perhaps two thousand pounds. Twenty copies of my first and worst book fetched one hundred pounds apiece! Dear God, is there anything more absurd than the values of first editions? [H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, 1935]

During 1899 and 1900, while finishing Villa Rubein, Galsworthy was also working on a number of long short stories. He continued the work during the early part of 1901, and by that summer thought that four of them were ready for publication in a volume. In the 1921 preface to Villa Rubein, he remarks that in these stories, especially in those entitled "A Knight" and "Salvation of a Forsyte", he first began to achieve a little of "that union of seer with thing seen" he had been working toward for five years. Nevertheless, he had more trouble getting the volume published than he had had with Villa Rubein. Duckworth, citing the novel's poor sales, refused. [Joseph] Conrad volunteered to help, and, early in August 1901, began a correspondence with Blackwoods. After several letters back and forth, requests for revision and cuts in length, four of the stories were published by Blackwoods as A Man of Devon in the autumn of 1901. Unlike the earlier work, each of these four stories is "written", each establishing a tone and a point of view which is consistently worked out and encompasses all the elements in the story. In the first, the title story, dedicated to his father, a young narrator from London, staying at a farm in Devon, tells, through letters, the story of a young girl's rebellion from her grandfather which leads eventually to her death. The narrator is always the outsider, sometimes comically as in his drinking whisky when everyone else drinks local wine or brandy and in his meticulous diagram of the rooms in the farmhouse, the placement of which enable him to hear the girl's tears. The outsider leads the reader slowly into the territory of the story, providing full descriptions of the lush farm, the changing weather, and the thick Devon land-and seascapes, and concentrating, like some of Conrad's ambivalent narrators, on a gradual immersion in the strange world. The narrator concentrates on the "feelings" he sees, the constant emotional conflict between the old man's "fierce tenderness" and the young girl's "restless, chafing", fond, and sometimes irresponsible temperament. The girl, Paisance, falls in love with Zachary Pearse, the adventurous and irresponsible son of a local seacaptain, who develops a scheme to grow rich by practising piracy on the Moroccan coast. Pearse defines his manhood as freedom, although the narrator sees him as a brutal opportunist with "no ideals, no principles". Paisance sees Pearse's kind of freedom as embodying the kind of God she is looking for: "Grandfather's God is simply awful. When I'm playing the fiddle, I can feel God; but grandfather's is such a stuffy God—you know what I mean: the sea, the wind, the trees, colours too—they make one feel." Prevented from sailing with Pearse by her grandfather and thinking of suicide, Paisance trips on the ledge of a cliff while watching Pearse's departing ship and falls to her accidental death.

The second story in the volume, written with crisper severity, is dedicated to his mother and called "A Knight". A young narrator, at Monte Carlo in the 1890s, sees a rather old, trim, shabby, ex-military gentleman walking his dog near the casino every day. They begin to talk and the narrator learns that the gentleman, an American, had fought with Garibaldi for Italian freedom in 1860 and in the American Civil War. The narrator is rather surprised when, at a concert with the old gentleman, seeing a whorish-looking woman stared at and hearing a whispered "the brazen baggage", the military man fulminates:

The hue and Cry! Comtemptible! How I hate it! . . . There are people to be found who object to vivisecting animals; but the vivisection of a woman, who minds that? . . . That her fellow-women should make an outcast of her? That we, who are men, should make a prey of her? . . . It is we who make them what they are.

This apparently random incident develops into the theme of the story, for, when the military man overhears two young Frenchmen casually insult a woman as "déclassé", he challenges the speaker to a duel and is killed. Later, the narrator discovers that the old gentleman was so protective of women, so much the "Don Quixote", because he was still defending his mysterious and unfaithful young wife, long since dead; looking at the old man's will, his careful protection of what little he had, the narrator recognizes him as "a knight". Done succinctly, the perspective of the story, presenting the "knight" as simultaneously outmoded, ludicrous and admirable, balances satire and pathos.

The third story in the volume, dedicated to Hubert Galsworthy, is called "Salvation of a Forsyte" and is the first of Galsworthy's works to introduce the Forsyte family, as well as the model for the later expansions of the Saga into the past that comprises On Forsyte 'Change. The story concerns Swithin, one of the Forsyte twin brothers, as he is dying in London in 1891, an old bachelor thinking back to his one journey to the Continent in 1850, "the only one of my characters", as Galsworthy said in his 1921 preface, "whom I killed before I gave him life". Remembering his trip with his twin James and a friend, Swithin recalls the time in Salzburg when he, siding automatically with the underdog, had defended a Hungarian in a fight in a café. Drawn into the life of a colony of Hungarians, nationalists and former freedom-fighters defeated in the aftermath of the continental uprisings of 1848, and having fallen in love with a vivacious and unpredictable Hungarian girl, Swithin decided to stay in Salzburg. He and the girl, Roszi, made love, and he lived more in terms of emotions and passions than he ever had in England. Awakening one morning to discover that the whole group, for political reasons, had hastened back to Hungary, Swithin followed, divided between attraction, fear, and shame for, as a middle-class Englishman, part of him was still distressed that "I've given myself away." Although he caught up with the family and was welcomed, he was unable to commit himself to the new life he saw, left and returned to join his twin. More than forty years later, his last words, spoken aloud in his revery, are "I've missed it." Developed slowly, with a careful analysis of Swithin's conflict and long imaginatively detailed descriptions of central Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, the story is a convincing depiction of Forsyte self-denial that, for the most part, does not sink in its own nostalgia. The final and slightest story in A Man of Devon is "The Silence", dedicated to his sister Mabel. Through a series of narrators within narrators, travellers and company directors, the story emerges of a manager in the remote part of an unnamed colony who runs his mine efficiently and profitably, manages strikes and native rebellions successfully, but kills himself when finally forced to report what has been going on. The final words of the report echo a theme frequent in Conrad's fiction, the ambivalently seen defeat of civilisation by the encroaching forest of darkness and silence. "The Silence" is, however, tame Conrad, and, although the story contains a number of sharply effective images, like the suburban villa of the company director near London described "as if the whole thing had been fastened to an anchor sunk beneath the pink cabbages of the drawing-room carpet", the theme here restricts any sense of experience too simply and rigidly, and the evocative richness of Conrad's kind of primeval darkness is never developed.

The four stories contain a number of elements that anticipate The Man of Property. Some of these are simply names, like Treffry and Forsyte, or classifications of character like the scene in which James' interest in "cures", in what other people think, in wills and in profit play against Swithin's characteristic focus on good food, elegant equipages of horse and carriage, and champagne. Galsworthy was also, in these stories, working toward some of the principal themes of The Man of Property. The fascination with emotional intensity that has Galsworthy almost seem to be visibly debating with himself in having Paisance think of suicide before tripping accidentally anticipates something of the more carefully developed treatment of the self-destructiveness of extreme emotion in Bosinney's death in The Man of Property. The theme of the nature of women, the questioning of what would be in our contemporary psychological terms the polarity between the madonna and the whore, is central to two of the stories. The theme, seen dramatically and from the outside, is the focus of "A Knight". And the same question, the same scepticism that any woman can be relegated to a category like madonna or whore, is seen internally in Swithin's recollected debates with himself in "Salvation of a Forsyte". Part of Swithin is the stereotype of his representation of family and society. When he realizes that Roszi and her family might have expected him to marry her, he is appalled: "Considering that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous." Yet he dies knowing that this internalized attitude has led him to miss everything that matters. A few other, much slighter, stories written at about the same time, "A Woman" (1900) and "The Miller of Dee" (1903), demonstrate Galsworthy's growing sympathy for the woman labelled as social outcast and his interest in the complicated nature of the female, almost invariably more direct and more unconventional than the male.

John Sinjohn's A Man of Devon received as many notices and reviews as had From the Four Winds. Most of them were mildly favourable, and reviewers were beginning to pay Galsworthy the compliment of seeing him within a fictional tradition, as a modern Thackeray or a more laborious version of Emily Brontë. The most extended favourable review and probably the first instance of unequivocal public appreciation of Galsworthy by someone he did not know appeared in the Graphic. The reviewer thought all four of the stories "exceptionally worthy":

All are tragic: but the tragedy is of the only right, that is to say, of the inevitable kind. Now and then Mr Sinjohn is to be suspected of having borrowed Mr Henry James's spectacles, and of seeing in a glance or a trick of habit more than such things can ever really mean, without attempting to say what it is he sees. But, after all, this is an extreme consequence of his insight into the infinite pathos of little things, and never blinds him to the import of the great ones [Marrot, Galsworthy].

Commentators since have generally followed the point of view that Ralph Mottram later suggested in calling the volume "Jack's true starting point". Mottram, in claiming particular "importance" for "Salvation of a Forsyte", acknowledged the introduction of the family on which much of Galsworthy's reputation and "the social history of England rests"; he argued that this is the first example of Galsworthy's "exposition of the base of all genuine tragedy . . . the time factor that brings and withdraws opportunity"; he praised the treatment of Salzburg and of the "poor, proud, incomprehensible Magyar characters". Yet, for Mottram, all these qualities were far less than the fact that "in this story as in no other that he wrote we can trace vividly by a sort of reflection what happened to Jack between 1895 and 1905, what part Ada played, fatefully, in his life, and what therefore survived indelibly moulded, to be the Ada and John Galsworthy of history" [R. H. Mottram, For Some We Loved]. The attitudes and perspectives of "A Knight" and "A Man of Devon" can, however, be read just as closely as can "Salvation of a Forsyte" to a "reflection of what happened to Jack between 1895 and 1905". "What happened" certainly concerned Ada centrally, but, in its objections to chauvinistic judgements, narrow codes of morality and imperialism, it concerned society, politics and more understanding of human nature as well.

Comment among Galsworthy's literary friends and contemporaries at the time showed more interest in and judicious appraisal of all four stories. Conrad, as administrator of the organization to help Jack Galsworthy become a writer, sent an early draft of "A Knight" (then called "A Cosmopolitan") to Ford for his opinion and a version of "A Man of Devon" to Edward Garnett for his. Always smoothly flattering, Conrad wrote to Mabel, who had apparently written thanking him for his help to her brother,

That I have detected the existence of that talent when in the nature of things it could not but be very obvious I shall always remember with pride, but in all conscience I must disclaim the credit you give me of being of help to him. One needs to be a very exceptional person to be of real use to his fellowmen. I've certainly talked, but had I never existed someone else would have found the same things to say—though not with the same loving care for his promise. That much I may admit without self-deception.

Conrad did, however, manage to inject something of his candid assessment: "I am afraid he can never look forward to other than limited appreciation. That he shall have it I feel certain—and even the other kind is possible too" [Letter, September 5, 1900, in Marrot]. Acting still as intermediary, Conrad reported to Galsworthy that Garnett had appreciated "A Man of Devon" "much more than is his nature to show to the author himself, although he had a few minor reservations about the "lack of some illustrative detail" in the characterization of Zachary Pearse [Letter, undated (probably September, 1900) in Marrot]. Garnett soon wrote Galsworthy a long letter, the first in a series of many over the next ten years, in which he went through the manuscript almost page by page, expressing agreement or disagreement with the fictional strategy, encouraging and giving advice for improvement. Garnett began his letter by saying that both he and his wife liked the story, thought it done with "no faltering, no falsity" and felt "the subtle changes of mood and emotion". He then went on to pick out passages in which he felt Galsworthy "overpleased with the picturesque", too inclined toward the "romantic" and too literal to be convincing about the motives of Zachary Pearse, suggesting that development of the natures of both Pearse and his mate was sacrificed to an excessive articulation of the writer's attitude [September 25, 1900, in Letters, Garnett]. Less than a month later, Garnett wrote a similarly detailed letter about "A Knight", praising that story as "quite successful, indeed too successful" because, although the old military man is done perfectly, the surviving letter from his wife that the narrator reads ought to add a "shock" of something that the old man was not himself aware of. This is the first of a number of examples of Garnett trying to make Galsworthy more dramatic, sometimes even melodramatic, than he was.

Ford's opinions were less likely to concern plot or drama, more likely to concentrate on images and references that expressed qualities in the texture of Galsworthy's fiction. He praised "Salvation of a Forsyte" as "far and away the best thing you have done" with "more grip, more force, and more reticence" [Letter to Galsworthy, in Marrot]. Ford thought the characterization of Swithin "finely ground glass", although at other points the story suffered from Galsworthy's "charm". On this occasion, the most astute and penetrating criticism of the volume of stories came, finally, from Conrad himself. After publication and after his wife had read the volume, Conrad read each story a second time and, without the slightly patronizing tone of the commentary on Jocelyn that "to invent depths is not art either", he tried to summarize what he thought of Galsworthy's achievements and possibilities:

There is a certain caution of touch which will militate against popularity. After all, to please the public (if one isn't a sugary imbecile or an inflated fraud) one must handle one's subject intimately. . . . You are really most profound and attain the greatest art in handling the people you do not respect. . . . The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth—the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages. You must never allow them to decoy you out of yourself. As against your people you must preserve an attitude of perfect indifference—the part of creative power. . . . Your attitude to them should be purely intellectual, more independent, freer, less rigorous than it is. You seem for their sake to hug your conceptions of right and wrong too closely. There is exquisite atmosphere in your tales. What they want now is more air. [November 11, 1901, in Marrot]

Toward the end of the long letter, Conrad particularly praised A Man of Devon, concluding that "You've gone now beyond the point where I could be of any use to you otherwise than just by my belief." Conrad did not always follow the implications of that conclusion, but, from late 1901 on, in his letters to Galsworthy, a new kind of respect is sometimes visible in addition to the old affection. . . .

Five Tales, for the most part avoiding both banality and melodrama, shows a variety of themes and contains Galsworthy's best writing since The Freelands. Each story, following his precepts about the form, is carefuly shaped and represents a balance of character, drama and what he called "atmosphere". The first of the tales, "The First and the Last", concerns a man who, in sudden rage, kills his mistress' brutal and cruel husband and then is so consumed with guilt, both for the killing and for the fact that someone else is convicted of the crime, that he kills himself. The story, however, is not dependent on the familiar Galsworthy theme of excessive guilt, but, rather, on the effective and understated irony of the difference between the guilty man and his brother, a respectable lawyer who had been trying to save him and who burns the suicide's confession in order to keep his own career spotless. The contrast between brothers implicitly questions and explores connections between guilt and responsibility that Galsworthy had not reached in his earlier similar fiction. "A Stoic", written in 1916, describes the final days of the strong old chairman of the board, trying to arrange security for the sexually appealing widow and children of his indigent illegitimate son, preferring those descendants to his legitimate ones, a dull, banal son and a dried-up, respectable daughter. The contrast and its thematic implications are familiar for Galsworthy, but the treatment of a number of businessmen's differing motives, the extensive description of the old sybarite's last elegant dinner, and a series of historical descriptions, embedded in his musings about the past, are all done with a clarity, conviction and compression that Galsworthy had not fully managed earlier. For example:

Born in the early twenties of the nineteenth century, Sylvanus Heythorp, after an education broken by escapades both at school and at college, had fetched up in that simple London of the late forties, where claret, opera, and eight per cent, for your money ruled a cheery roost. Made partner in his shipping firm well before he was thirty, he had sailed with a wet sheet and a flowing tide; dancers, claret, Cliquot, and piquet; a cab with a tiger; some travel—all that delicious early-Victorian consciousness of nothing save a golden time. It was all so full and mellow that he was forty before he had his only love affair of any depth—with the daughter of one of his clerks, a liaison so awkward as to necessitate a sedulous concealment.

Galsworthy was beginning to fashion a prose of imagistic compression for the details of ordinary life and social history. Both of these first two stories became plays, "The First and the Last" a short one with the same title, and "A Stoic" the full-length play "Old English." In each case, however, the play, while sharpening the dramatic implications of the contrast in character, eliminates the complexity of character's motives, and Galsworthy's sense of action in those instances has not the resonance of his prose at its best. Both "A Stoic" and the next tale, "The Apple Tree", in which a man, after twenty-six years, returns to the site of his brief love for a Devon farm girl, complicate and play with uses of the frequent Galsworthy term "chivalry". "Chivalry" can suggest sensitivity, sometimes appearing in places and characters unexpected, or it can be rescue, from a variety of motives, or it can mean abandonment, a world well lost for love. Although always connecting the term with a man's sexual feeling for a woman, the varieties of usage, in context, suggest a growing capacity to treat varieties of sexual and emotional experience without resorting to the cosmic as a repository for human passion. "The Apple Tree" also uses effectively the Devon landscape that is simultaneously particular, vibrant and a convincing metaphorical statement about the characters' emotions. The story, however, does end in melodrama. Having carefully shown the principal character's guilty desertion of the love of the Devon farm girl and his conscious choice for a wife of the contrasting familiar "atmosphere as of some old walled-in English garden, with pinks, and corn-flowers, and roses, and scents of lavender and lilac—cool and fair, untouched, almost holy—all that he had been brought up to feel was clean and good", the story ends with his discovery that the Devon girl had committed suicide shortly after he left. The ending wrenches the tale out of balance, emphasizes the guilt and self-punishment at the expense of the complexity and flawed humanity of the choice so carefully developed through most of the story. The fourth tale, "The Juryman", the shortest and slightest of the five, which had been widely noticed when it appeared in magazines in both England and America in September 1917, is an effective and understated contrast between the life of the respectable and prosperous juryman with the cool wife of whom he is proud and the life of the neurasthenic soldier he judges who is on trial for desertion because, unable to bear separation from his wife, he tried to kill himself. To his surprise, the juryman is moved by the soldier's emotion and argues for acquittal. When he later tries to explain to his wife his newly conscious emotions and sympathies, his fuller understanding of the varieties of "chivalry", she, in a brilliantly conveyed conclusion, submits goodhumouredly and indifferently to their usual act of sex. As in the other stories, familiar Galsworthy themes are given more compressed, psychologically complex and deeper treatment.

The last of the stories in Five Tales is the famous continuation of the Forsytes, left off more than a decade earlier, entitled "Indian Summer of a Forsyte". Galsworthy wrote the long story, about 18,000 words, in London in April and May of 1917, just after he returned from France. He soon wrote to Charles Scribner to substitute the story for "Defeat", an earlier undistinguished story about a proud and cynical German prostitute in London during the war, in the impending edition of Five Tales [Letter, July 17, 1917]. Taking place about four years after the end of The Man of Property, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" switches away from the novel's conclusion in which Irene had been left enclosed in Soames' house in Montpelier Square, as if permanently imprisoned. The story reveals that she left the next day, at first wandering and desolate, eventually recovering to live independently as a music teacher in Chelsea. During the story, she wanders back to Robin Hill, the country house Soames had built for her and that Old Jolyon had later bought to live in with the son with whom he was reunited and all his grandchildren. Irene and Old Jolyon meet, while Young Jolyon, his wife, and June are away travelling in Spain for months, and they see each other several times a week, at Robin Hill, where Irene gives music lessons to Holly, and in London, where they go to the opera together, until Old Jolyon dies on a hot summer day waiting for Irene's last visit. Not only do the implications of the plot change, but the characters are also expanded. Old Jolyon is less a symbol of benevolent orthodoxy and patriarchy than an old man with a particular set of tastes and convictions that both express his own sense of art and beauty and reflect something about his historical generation. In showing Irene Robin Hill, which Young Jolyon had decorated in "pearl-grey and silver", Old Jolyon thinks of the difference between himself and his son:

He would have had gold himself; more lively and solid. But Jo had French tastes, and it had come out shadowy like that, with an effect as of the fume of cigarettes the chap was always smoking, broken here and there by a little blaze of blue or crimson colour. It was not his dream! Mentally he had hung this space with those gold-framed masterpieces of still and stiller life which he had bought in days when quantity was precious.

Old Jolyon is, however, open-minded and willing to move some distance toward the tastes of the new age, as he is willing to move some distance toward emotions in revolt from Victorian property and propriety:

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls. Old Jolyon could not bear a strong cigar or Wagner's music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Glück, and Schumann, and, for some occult reason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he had succumbed to Botticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been conscious of divergence from the standard of the Golden Age. Their poetry was not that of Milton and Byron and Tennyson; of Raphael and Titian; Mozart and Beethoven. It was, as it were, behind a veil; their poetry hit no one in the face, but slipped its fingers under the ribs and turned and twisted, and melted up the heart.

Similarly, Irene, dressed always in "pearl-grey", is no longer simply the vague symbol for beauty. She is a hardworking music teacher, a charitable sponsor of women bearing illegitimate children, a conscious philo-Semite (in contrast with Old Jolyon's Victorian feelings that Jews are "strange, and doubtful"), and a woman sensitive to the way emotions from the past linger in the present. In short, both Old Jolyon and Irene are given social and personal identities. They are not, as they sometimes seemed to be in the earlier novel, Irene more than Old Jolyon, simply counters for approbation or satire, and they become, through the tangible imagery of their tastes and opinions, more complicated and searching historical representations.

Irene and Old Jolyon are also able to talk with one another, to face the implications of the past and recognize what is possible for the present. Irene can talk of what Bosinney was and thought and represented for her; Old Jolyon, even as he approaches death, can recognize his own jealousy of Bosinney. For Galsworthy, the reconciliation between the loved woman and the father, a reconciliation that never occurred in reality and that takes place when the central character and surrogate for the author, the son, is not even there, is a necessary element for any sense of unified experience. The father is so strong and so worshipped that he must be appeased; the woman is so venerated and so different that she must be brought into the central focus of social history. That the son is still passive in his absence, still withdrawn while others create the reconciliation for him, gives the tale something of an aura of sentimental wish-fulfilment. And this incipient sentimentality is compounded by all the repeated images of and references to Old Joylon's impending death. Yet the sentimentality, unlike that in some of Galsworthy's earlier fiction, is never made cosmic or "spiritual", and it does not destroy the fabric of historical and personal connection between the characters. Although still needing more hardness, activity and compression, "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" begins Galsworthy's full artistic transposition of his past into detailed historical myth.

Five Tales, dedicated to André Chevrillon, generated an enthusiastic reception. The American edition, for example, was reprinted three times in less than a year. Reviews, although limited in number because of the limited space in 1918 publications, were uniformly favourable. A number praised the volume for the omission of old Galsworthy faults, exaggerated "sexuality" and "socialism" ["Mr. Galsworthy's Old Men," Saturday Review, August 17, 1918]. Others praised Galsworthy's irony, sympathy and, above all, his "art", one critic, appreciating the stories as different combinations of "passion" and "ironic method", described the whole volume as an example of his artistic growth. For the first time in more than a decade, a Galsworthy volume seemed to excite numbers of literate readers individually, becoming the subject of frequent recommendations from one person to another. The young Protean intellectual Harold Laski (1893-1950), in his correspondence with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, praised the volume's "exquisite sensitiveness", and recommended that the Justice read it [May 6, 1918, in Holmes-Laski Letters, Vol. 1]. William Lyon Phelps thought his earlier faith in Galsworthy, tried for years, completely restored, and he continued to maintain that "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" was the most moving and effective fiction Galsworthy ever wrote. Other friends were equally unequivocal, like Conrad, reading the volume before publication: "Dearest Jack—The only thing that can be said of the stories without the slightest qualification is that they ARE. I mean that they are from the first line to the last" [Letter, October 21, 1917, in Marrot]. He went on to praise each story individually. Archer particularly liked "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" and "A Stoic":

Where do you get your power of drawing old age? I think you must have been an octogenarian in your last incarnation, and have some trailing clouds of memory with you from the experience. I wonder what old man you were? It would be interesting to read the obituary column of The Times on the day of your birth. For you must have been an Englishman and a man of property, whose death would be sure to go into The Times. [August 7, 1918, in Marrot]

Florence Hardy wrote to Ada because she wanted to say how much both she and her husband loved the volume:

It was a joy to read it aloud to him. I read it to myself first. He made me read it very carefully and slowly 'because,' he said, 'it's Galsworthy.'

Upon the whole he liked best "The Apple Tree" because of its poetry. I preferred "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" and "A Stoic" because of the two wonderful old men. Jolyon Forsyte is a most beautiful character, and now I can read The Man of Property without a terrible feeling of despair [August 13, 1918, in Marrot].

Hardy himself wrote to Galsworthy about the volume twice, the first time to thank the author and report that his wife was reading the volume first so that he had, as yet, no chance to respond. The second letter, including a poem he had just written, combined high praise with his own direct and personal kind of response. He appreciated the portraits of the old men particularly, despite the fact that he did not "usually like old men" in fiction, perhaps because "I am one myself.