On Forsyte 'Change
[Below, the critic presents a favorable assessment of On Forsyte 'Change.]
Mr. Galsworthy gives us with unneeded apologies his volume of "apocryphal Forsyte tales," (On Forsyte 'Change), fragments that stop the remaining chinks in the history of the clan between 1821 and 1918. Time has moved on while Mr. Galsworthy has been writing these annals, and more and more his Forsytes, who began by being very much of a joke, have acquired the dignity of history; they are no longer mere individuals or a mere family, they are a whole social order and a lost one.
The consciousness, or subconsciousness, of this in the author's mind gives a unity to these detached pieces; for nearly each one of them shows the time-spirit gnawing away some timber of the splendidly upholstered Forsyte mansion. Amid the insecure chaos of post-War England the survivors of the great Victorian Forsytes stand like grey monoliths covered with unintelligible maxims of prudence and morality, in the same way as in their heyday the relics of the Georgian Forsytes encumbered their drawingrooms with the rugged or fantastic outlines of a ruder and more reckless age. Just as in the first episode of this collection young Jolyon fingers with amused perplexity the paste shoe-buckles that old "Superior Dosset" Forsyte used to wear with his knee-breeches, while Aunt Ann recalls the harsh integrity of his builder's creed: just as later on the "Dromios" (Giles and Jesse Hayman) pause in the lounge of the Brighton Hotel to comment with laconic pity on the ornate and slumbering figure of "Four-in-Hand Forsyte" (Uncle Swithin) while he dreams of the days of "Lord Melbourne, the Cider Cellars and the Pavilion": so in the last episode Soames Forsyte is eyed askance by the Armistice mob as he stands listening to the maroons blowing into air the last scraps of his world. And in between that prologue haunted by the ghost of "Superior Dosset" and this epilogue that relegates Soames to the shades we are shown some of the stages and signposts of the change. We learn how Aunt Juley dared to introduce a dog into Timothy's household: how Mrs. Nicholas Forsyte actually gained independence and an allowance of her own: how poor old James when he bought the Hondekoeter as a bargain at the picture auction had to bow to the judgment of the younger members of the clan and hide the huge glistening canvas of cocks and hens in the boxroom—although it was a bargain: how Eustace Forsyte, jammed among a proletarian crowd in the Tube during an air-raid, perceived that there was a people and couldn't deny that the people were human.
In all these stories you are led to smile at the old Forsytes, but the laugh is not always against them. They reveal in such tales as "Hester's Little Tour," "Aunt Juley's Courtship," "Midsummer Madness" and the wistfully lovely "Cry of Peacock" that they are of our clay, with ordinary passions and, men and women alike, capable—even in 1845 or 1880—of trampling on their Prayer-books or throwing their caps over the mill. Behind their stucco façades and brass doorknobs they are not all the time shrinking from life, but considering how to dominate it. How Napoleonic is the march whereby Roger Forsyte extricates his daughter Francie from her entanglement with the "fourpenny foreigner" who played the fiddle! And Mr. Galsworthy loyally points the moral. Francie opined that her father would "have a fit" when he learned of her engagement.
There . . . she went wrong in her psychology, incapable, like all the young Forsytes, of appreciating exactly the quality which had made the fortunes of all the old Forsytes. In a word, they had fits over small matters, but never over large. When stark reality stared them in the face they met it with the stare of a still starker reality.
This profound verdict on the caste he has described so often and so lovingly, despite his castigation of it, throws light on that beautiful last chapter to which one is drawn back again as one reads it. For this quintessential Forsytism is concentrated in Soames as he faces in old age the strain of the War. With his stubborn Victorian distaste for the whole idea of England in a European conflict, and his tenacity in maintaining that she must yet see the thing through; with his hatred of the vapouring and the panics, and his inarticulate furious patriotism—there he stands, the epitome of a generation. We leave him on Armistice morning under the dome of St. Paul's.
He went because it was big and old and empty, and English, and because it reminded him. He walked up the aisle and stood looking at the roof of the dome. Christopher Wren! Good old English name! Good old quiet English stones and bones! No more sudden death, no more bombs, no more drowning ships, no more poor young devils taken from home and killed! Peace!
Farewell, forgotten sentry over old treasure-chests!
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