The End of the Forsytes
Swan Song. By John Calsworthy. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) WHATEVER any individual judgment of this book may be, no one can approach it without realizing that it marks the completion of a fine noble work. The judgments of Mr. Galsworthy's art as a whole are many and varied. Like all artists of individuality, he has characteristics that may be held to be faults by certain standards, and weaknesses that are temperamental, and therefore especially noteworthy to critics of another temperament. Moreover, it is quite impos- sible for anyone to write a work in six long volumes and not make clear to all the world his every note and tone and accent. These accents have indeed been made clear in The Forsyte Saga and its sequel. If anyone wants to know precisely what Mr. Galsworthy is as man and artist, as novelist and poet, as philosopher and theorist, let him read these volumes.
One's first inclination on finishing Swan Song is to lose discussion of it in consideration of the whole work. But although it is impossible to forget the work as a whole, yet this is not the place for that general discussion ; there will be plenty of occasion for that. What anyone who has been interested in the preceding volumes will want to know is this : Does this final concluding volume round off the Saga suffi- ciently ? Are we, on laying it down, satisfied with a proper sense of fulfilment ? Are we conscious now that a great work has been added to English literature ? Great and great, there is no satisfactory definition of this adjective. If by great we mean : has Mr. Galsworthy completed for his own time and generation another War and Peace ? the answer is, of course, in the negative. Mr. Galsworthy's work is not great in that titanic sense ; but if we mean by our question, is there here a work worthy of following in the fine tradition of English fiction, a proper successor in its own kind to Clarissa and Vanity Fair, the Barchester novels and Middlemarch and Beauchamp's Career? the answer is, I think, yes. The six volumes of The Forsyte Saga may be greater or less than these other masterpieces, but they are in the proper succession, and will, I am convinced, seem so to our posterity. And, one may add, it is comforting and refreshing in these days of hurried, fragmentary and cynical little works of fiction to have at one's hand anything as carefully wrought, as solidly conceived, as patiently elaborated as these books.
As to Swan Song itself, it is both successful and disap- pointing. It is successful as the rounding up of the whole work ; it is disappointing, I think, as a novel by itself. Mr. Gals-worthy has been under the trouble here common to all the winders up of family histories of a compulsion to fasten all the many different strands into a final pattern. It is in the main a book of ghosts, of echoes and memories and ironic sighs. Of Soames especially this is true ; he is throughout the book in reminiscent mood ; not a step can he take without having suggested to him some fragment of the past. We recover the fragments as easily as he ; it is one of the powers and enchantments of such a work that we look back over distances of time to figures and scenes that seem especially ours-.because we have lived through them so long ago :..-the sad face of Irene, the quiet scorn of Bosinney, the courage of old JoIyon, we seem to have an especial right and property in these. In this book we are taken back to many of the old praces and especially to that fateful house that Bosinney designed, and the whole theme of this book is the renewed love of young Jon, son of Irene, and Fleur, daughter of Soames. In this Mr. Galsworthy achieves his chief irony. Because of Soames's insistence on his property rights at the first, so now his final tragedy comes through that same in- sistence on property rights stated by Anne, Jon's wife. Sym- bolically Soames loses his life in his attempt to save his property ; one of his own deeply cherished; tightly clutched pictures, falling, 'strikes and kills him. It is indeed a faii matter" of criticism here that Mr. Galsworthy, as in the past, uses his symbolism too easily. Fiver's painted fruit, the sour fruit of a later page, the 'fire among the pictures, these are manufactured a little too clearly for our proper conviction.
It is because of the symbolism and the deeper meaning with which every word is charged that the characters are ghost-like. We are told little about young Jon save that he is simple and honest after his kind ; little about Anne his wife ; almost nothing about Michael, whose scheme for ameliorating the slums, like the- Foggartyism of an earlier book, comes to nothing at all. It seems that in this hook Mr. Gals-worthy meant to make more of certain incidents than he has done. Both the slum committees and the racing scenes are scarcely justified of their place, and in the actual incident of the book we seem to overhear rather than to hear, as once before we did in the love affair of Irene and Bosinney, the movements and feelings of the characters. And yet, to one reader at least, this sense of hush and whisper is exactly what gives the book its character and beauty. We do not want it to be an ordinary novel ; it is right that it should die away into an echo, a sigh. We are intended to feel in it the final close of an epoch, a doctrine and a creed. The sadness that there is in the book is not only a sadness of event, it is also the sadness that all of us must feel when things pass, when we find ourselves unable to hold in our hands any longer the moments and the people and the beauty that we have loved. Soames's dying whisper is his own confession of failure of possession, and so a motto of the whole work. Inci- dentally this chapter of Soames's death is very beautiful, as fine as anything that Mr. Galsworthy has ever done. Arnold Bennett in The Old Wives' Tale gave us with less poetry and possibly less sentiment this same magnificent realization of the futility of material life, and as in The Old Wives' Tale so here in another way, nothing seems lost, the pageant of life being enough of itself for justification if we do not clutch at it too greedily. Soames himself, Fleur his daughter, have made that clutch on life and suffered for it, and their suffering has been our gain. Swan Song in its restraint, economy and pathos is a beautiful ending to a fine work.
HUGH WALPOLE.
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