[In the following review, Kennedy offers a generally positive review of Galsworthy 's Caravan but contends that "a golden mediocrity honeys and mitigates all his achievement. "]

But two birds haunt the heights of Parnassus—not, as some have fabled, the eagle and the dove, but the phoenix and the ibis: the phoenix, lonely in eminence:

that self-begotten bird,
In the Arabian woods imbost,
That no second knows nor third;

and the ibis, which, as everybody remembers, is safest in the middle. There is a paradox about each of them. By the phoenix one does not mean a single literal supremacy, such as might be claimed for Shakespeare: one means the supreme quality which, wherever it is met, stands out as lord and beacon of its kind. One meets it more often in Shakespeare than anywhere else, of course; but it is to be found in lesser folk, and in odd corners. It is known by indubitable physical signs: the pit of the stomach gives, the backbone dissolves, tears come into the eyes, and one exclaims publicly in a clear voice (or privately in the heart): "By Heaven, this is the goods!" By these signs is the phoenix recognised in many places. There is one phoenix, but there are several thousand phoenixes; and that is the paradox. The paradox of the ibis is different, and reminds one of Aristotle's argument about virtue. Virtue is a mean between two extremes, and yet to be virtuous is to take an extreme course: just so, the ibis is in a sense mediocre, missing the raptures as well as the depths, and yet this very adherence to the mean may prove an art so admirable in its adequacy as to rise, to shine, to soar, to have a supremacy all its own.

Mr. Galsworthy's muse is the chief ibis of our day. A golden mediocrity honeys and mitigates all his achievement. His theme is the middle-class, his range the middle register: the brutality of his method is nicely balanced with its sentimentality, so that his characters often appear (as Mr. Beerbohm pointed out in an unkind parody) futile: he excels in description of those two essentially middle-class occupations, board-meetings and meals; nobody ever less resembled Sir Andrew Aguecheek, yet it is impossible to read his works without recalling the wise knight's epigram—who, when he was asked: "Does not our life consist of the four elements?" replied: "Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking." Even here the paradox runs. The Forsytes as a family resemble that hero described by Mr. Barry Pain: "He does everything well. He does himself well." They do themselves too well; yet Soames, their representative and core, is almost excessively moderate. There is nothing remarkable about Soames; he is the very embodiment of what Mr. Galsworthy calls "Forsyte tenacity," yet he can neither hold what is his or get what he wants; he is at once a failure and a success, a scapegoat and a conqueror. But he will occupy a permanent place in the great gallery of British portraits, with Falstaff and Squire Western and Mr. Wardle and Mr. Polly.

This being so, it follows that Mr. Galsworthy is not merely an artist, but, with all his limitations, a great artist: one of the few living novelists who have added something to the corpus of the indestructible. His collected tales, called Caravan, will scarcely rival The Forsyte Saga in importance; but they contain some first-rate stuff. Perhaps the two best stories in the collection are "A Stoic" and "Had a Horse." The former is an epic of oysters and sweetbreads and cutlets, champagne and sherry and old brandy; the latter is equine; and, in the British middle-class hierarchy of idealisms, horse-flesh comes next to beef and mutton. Both stories are first-rate, because in both, whether through the grossness or through the meanness, the pure light of human personality, the unquenched lamp of human heroism, shines. Futile? No, no: that Beerbohm arrow, though sharp and piercing, was fledged with injustice: there is a notable though not a large proportion of Galsworthian characters who escape futility. But it must be admitted that some of the short ironic sketches in this book are comparative failures.

A special interest should be taken in the first story, which appeared, I believe, in Villa Rubeln in 1900—thus preceding by six years the publication of A Man of Property. It is called "Salvation of a Forsyte," and its topic is an old one: the topic of Browning's

Alas,
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!

Swithin is on his death-bed, and he remembers. Now it is a firm convention, rooted like most conventions in the realities of human nature, that old gentlemen on their deathbeds remember the romance of their youth. Passion, like faith and sanctity, is an error only when present: it is always found correct by the audit of time. Some men, indeed, do not wait for the death-bed. There used to be a figure very popular on the London stage—it was enacted with the perfection of virtuosity by George Alexander—the elderly though still attractive fellow, the friend of the family, who lectured the young ones for their good and yet let the audience know that he had been a dog too in his day. He wore the white flower of a blameless life in his buttonhole and a crown of wild oats in his hair—thus making the best of both worlds. Then there is that happy and lovely book, Young April, by Agnes and Egerton Castle, in which the hero's brief love-affair is so thrilling that he must surely hold a life-time of subsequent respectability to be but light payment for it. Mr. Galsworthy, as usual, is in the middle: he allows himself neither the false sentiment of the one type nor the pure romance of the other; Swithin, at thirty-eight, when he met and loved Rozsi in Salzburg, was bothered all the time by doubts and hesitations. Perhaps she was making a fool of him! Perhaps she was trying to trap him into marriage! And anyway she was a foreigner. A foreigner! But her image returns after forty years to trouble him. "Aloud, in his sleep, Swithin muttered: 'I've missed it.'" When he woke, he could not remember what it was that he had lost.

Struggling on his pillows, he clutched the wine-glass. His lips touched the wine. 'This isn't the 'Heidseck!'" he thought angrily, and before the reality of that displeasure all the dim vision passed away. But as he bent to drink, something snapped, and, with a sigh, Swithin Forsyte died above the bubbles. . . .

A beautiful death, and characteristic of its author. His irony lends originality. In the volume as a whole, the hits exceed the misses by a considerable proportion; and the many sides of Mr. Galsworthy's talent are revealed to one purpose. The ibis whets its silver wings.