A review of The Forsyte Saga
[In the following review, the critic praises Galsworthy's ability to create familiar and sympathetic characters in The Forsyte Saga.]
At various times Mr. Galsworthy has written three novels and two short stories about the same family. The last of the novels brings the chronicle down to the year 1920. It is therefore closed, at least for some time, and Mr. Galsworthy has taken the opportunity of grouping all these works within one cover. He has also, and, we cannot help thinking, unluckily, taken the opportunity of presenting all these works as if they were one work. So regarded, they make, at least at first sight, a very imposing whole. It is a volume of over eleven hundred pages. It contains more characters (and real, recognizable characters) than can easily be counted. It covers thirty-four years. It is a sort of English War and Peace. Only it is not. The device of calling novels "books" and short stories "interludes" does not make one work out of five or give unity and symmetry to what obviously was not composed or even imagined as a whole. And perhaps the title given to the collection is a trifle unfortunate. Mr. Galsworthy says:—
The Forsyte Saga was the title originally destined for the part of it which is called The Man of Property; and to adopt it for the collected chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytean tenacity which is in all of us. The word saga might be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic and that there is little of heroism in these pages. But it is used with a suitable irony; and, after all, this long tale, though it may deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict. Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days, as they have come down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the old sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that "family" and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to "talk them out."
"Days that never were"! That is precisely the point. Mr. Galsworthy is a realist, not in any vulgar sense, but in a true sense; his people exist and move on the same plane as ourselves. The people of the Sagas do not. And the word "Saga" is used to describe a work of literary art. Whether the real people whose projections we have in the Sagas were like the Forsytes—that is, like ourselves—is immaterial. This is not "suitable irony," for Mr. Galsworthy apparently does not intend any satirical contrast between the Forsytes and the heroes. It is merely a little joke; and to put a little joke on the title-page of so large a book is surely rather a mistake.
It has been worth while drawing attention to these two small points, because they do stand somewhat hinderingly on the threshold of what is undoubtedly the most considerable part of Mr. Galsworthy's work. When they are disposed of, it is possible to see how considerable a thing in itself has been the creation of the Forsyte family. Mr. Galsworthy obligingly affixes a genealogical table to this edition which serves a certain purpose in that when we look at it we find it to be unnecessary. We know the Forsyte family as well as our own; indeed, while we are in the book it is our own family, we ourselves are Forsytes, and do not need to be reminded of the various relationships of our uncles and aunts and cousins. How Mr. Galsworthy manages to produce this effect it is by no means easy to say. He does not exhaustively tell us everything about the Forsytes. He swoops down on them on three occasions, narrates three episodes in their collective existence, and yet somehow he does convey to us the sense he himself must have very strongly of their continuous life.
And he has achieved this without making his work merely a transcript from reality. "This long tale," he says, "is no scientific study of a period; it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men." Here, again, one cannot help quarrelling a little with the author's own explanation. This seems to us to ascribe altogether too much importance, both particularly and symbolically, to Irene Heron, who wrecked June Forsyte's marriage, brought about the death of Philip Bosinney, ran away from Soames Forsyte, and was eventually divorced by him with "Young Jolyon" Forsyte for co-respondent. It is to her that Mr. Galsworthy refers as "a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world." But surely the beauty with which Mr. Galsworthy makes these chronicles something better than a transcript from life is not isolated in Irene; it is in his own attitude, in his own delighted awareness of the life of the persons he has recorded or created. Irene is beautiful, true enough, and sometimes a sense of her mysterious power starts out of the pages of the book, though, as Mr. Galsworthy points out, she is "never . . . present, except through the senses of other characters." But there is beauty, too, in the understanding of old Swithin, in the just appreciation of the unloved Soames, cursed by being too sensitive and yet not sensitive enough. Indeed, Mr. Galsworthy's greatest successes are always with conventionally "unsympathetic" characters. Give him a fine old gentleman like Old Jolyon, or a knight-errant like Young Jolyon, and he can do little more than express his liking and approval. The effect these characters have on the reader depends on what they are in themselves. But give him a character whom it is in the conventions to condemn or to deride, and he is at his best. Then the effect on the reader is of that subtle and often impressive sort which springs precisely from the relation between author and character.
He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold and onyx buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three champagne bottles deeper into ice pails. Between the points of his stand-up collar which—though it hurt him to move—he would on no account have had altered, the pale flesh of his underchin remained immovable. His eyes roved from bottle to bottle. He was debating, and he argued like this:—"Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps two, he's so careful of himself. James, he can't take his wine nowadays. Nicholas—" Fanny and he would swill water, he shouldn't wonder! Soames didn't count, these young nephews—Soames was thirty-eight—couldn't drink! But Bosinney? Encountering in the name of this stranger something outside the range of his philosophy, Swithin paused. A misgiving arose within him! It was impossible to tell! June was only a girl, in love, too! Emily (Mrs. James) liked a good glass of champagne. It was too dry for Juley, poor old soul, she had no palate. As to Hatty Chessman! The thought of this old friend caused a cloud of thought to obscure the perfect glassiness of his eyes. He shouldn't wonder if she drank half a bottle!
...He himself might drink a good deal, for, thanks to that p—prescription of Blight's, he found himself extremely well, and he had been careful to take no lunch. He had not felt so well for weeks. Puffing out his lower lip, he gave his last instructions:—
"Adolf, the least touch of the West India when you come to the ham."
This is like one of those pictures in which mean or indifferent objects are made to seem beautiful by the light in which they stand. This quality in Mr. Galsworthy's work is of a variable, come-and-go order. Sometimes his austere, impartial love of his characters as they are—for in this sense he, if no one else, loves Soames the unlovable—passes over into bias and favouritism. Old Jolyon, for example, begins as a much less fine, much more borné character than he afterwards becomes; and this is not due to development in him, for he is eighty when we first meet him. But though it is intermittent, it is the dominating and peculiar quality in Mr. Galsworthy's work, this dry, cool, and yet golden light which from time to time he is able to shed on his characters and their interactions.
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