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BERGONZI.
THE habitual assumption that the Victorian era didn't really end until 1914 has some- thing to recommend it if one is filling in a large enough historical canvas. All the same, it is inexact and can be misleading; it can, for ex- ample, obscure the fact that there was a genuine if limited Edwardian revolt against Victorianism. One of the more interesting mani- festations of this revolt was John Galsworthy's The Man of Property, published in 1906. In this novel, set in the heavily respectable upper- middle-class London of the Eighties, Galsworthy first introduced to the world that vast inter- locking clan of Forsytes who were subsequently to become softened in the public imagination to a gallery of much-loved familiar old faces. But Galsworthy's original intention was satirical and, for its time, bold. The Forsytes, brooding over their property and the price of Consols, were rendered with a cold, derisive eye. And no one was drawn with sharper irony than the novel's central figure, Soames Forsyte, a rising solicitor in his thirties, tight-lipped, closely shaven and supercilious (in his delineation of Soames Galsworthy made a classical embodi- ment of the Freudian anal-erotic type, complete with hoarding instinct). The novel describes the break-up of Soames's marriage. For all his cold nature he is passionately in love with his beautiful wife, Irene; but Irene not only doesn't love him, she finds him physically repulsive. She falls in love with the young architect, Philip Bosinney, and their affair ends tragically. In this novel. Galsworthy was attempting to make a plea for sexual freedom for women—the misery of Irene's life with Soames is vividly, even hysterically, described—and to expose the oppressiveness of an ethos which reduces every- thing to questions of property. The novel is centred on two pieces of highly expensive prop- erty—Robin Hill, the country house which Bosinney is building for Soames, and Irene her- self. Galsworthy establishes a parallel between them by showing Soames engaging in litigation with Bosinney over the price of Robin Hill, at the same time that he is losing Irene to him. Galsworthy emphasises the 'property' motif with some insistence: at one point Soames ex- ercises his marital rights over Irene in what,
i It is implied, is a virtual rape, and this is later
described as `the greatest—the supreme act of property.' The Man of Property is not an en- tirely convincing novel; Galsworthy is a good deal better at social satire than in depicting scenes of passion—some of these are distinctly melodramatic. But the satire is sufficiently Prevalent and incisive to make it a fairly memor- able novel—Certainly one of the best to come out of Edwardian England. Galsworthy draws the Forsytes as purely social beings: rather more than mere caricatures, but something less than deeply conceived fictional characters. Hence, Perhaps, their air of existing on the same plane of reality as their furniture and hangings,
stuffed and gilded objects rather than authentic persons. It is impossible to imagine them out- side the inevitable setting of their tall, over- furnished houses in Kensington or Bayswater. Like, for instance, old Swithin Forsyte, who had `an impatience of simplicity, a love of ormolu,' and over whose dining-table `a cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a giant stalactite above its centre, radiating over large gilt-framed mirrors, slabs of marble on the tops of side tables, and heavy gold chairs with crewel worked seats.' In passages such as this Galsworthy shows a remarkable facility for re-creating the quality of life of prosperous Victorians—whose scattered elements now clutter the Portobello Road. Yet this very facility, in some ways working against the satirical intention, might suggest a degree of concealed imaginative sympathy that could become overt.
And so it was to prove. Turning from The Man of Property to the succeeding volumes that make up The Forsyte Saga, and still more to the following trilogy, A Modern Comedy, which follows Soames's fortunes through to the mid-Twenties, one is struck and disconcerted by the way in which Galsworthy sentimentalises the Forsytes, and transforms Soames from something very like a villain into the admired and endorsed central intelligence of the sequence. As D. H. Lawrence remarked: `Galsworthy had not quite enough of the superb courage of his satire. He faltered, and gave in to the Forsytes.' To recognise the blatant col- lapse of Galsworthy's original intention is one thing, but it is another to try to explain it. And for this one can profitably consult Mr. Dudley Barker's informative study.* Galsworthy was al- most unique among the writers who dominated the early-twentieth-century literary scene in having the background and education of a conventional English gentleman. His father was a wealthy solicitor—the model for Old Jolyon in The Man of Property—and Galsworthy's early life fol- lowed a predictable course: Harrow, New College, the Bar (though he didn't practise). He loved dogs, and throughout his life religiously attended the Eton and Harrow match. At first he showed no inclination towards a literary career; he didn't start writing until nearly thirty.
The event that shattered the pattern of Galsworthy's life was his falling in love with Ada Galsworthy, the wife of his cousin Arthur. Their liaison, more or less secret, dragged on for nine years until Arthur finally divorced Ada. She married John Galsworthy in September, 1905, soon after he had completed The Man of Property. It was Ada who first prompted Galsworthy to start writing, and his distress at her supposed sufferings at the hands of Arthur was projected in the Irene-Soames situation (Ada, v. ho was a deeply neurotic
* THE MAN OF PRINCIPE E : A VIEW OF JOHN GALSW ORMY. By Dudley Barker. (Heinemann, 30s.)
woman, may well have exaggerated or even fabricated the story of Arthur's misdeeds—but John believed her implicitly). At all events, it is evident that the satirical impulse behind The Man of Property largely originated in Gals- worthy's personal situation during the years in which he was writing the novel. He had accumulated a massive resentment against the treatment Ada had received from the upholders of conventional Victorian pieties—from 'Society.' His animus was that of someone who feels that he has been badly treated by his own class, not of a fundamental enemy of that class and its no more than skin-deep.
Once John and Ada were married it was not long before they were happily re-absorbed. Galsworthy was acquiring a fashionable reputa- tion as novelist and playwright: the road to the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature lay gleaming ahead. Defiance of con- vention had, perhaps, made him a novelist, but once he was established he was entirely re- possessed by all the fundamental assumptions of his class and upbringing. When he once more took up the Forsyte story in 1918 he was a respected eider statesman of letters, for whom the mood that had produced The Man of Property must have seemed remote and in- accessible. Yet he hadn't the slightest qualms about continuing the story with a totally trans- formed scheme of values, and a quite different view of its central character. For all his admir- able personal qualities—he was a tireless sup- porter of good causes and gave away a large part of his earnings—it is difficult to be fair to the later Galsworthy as a writer. He con- tinued, of course, to be an excellent story-teller, with a lively feeling for intrigue. But once he ceased to be •a satirist his work lost all emotional coherence. His view of reality was hopelessly soft-centred. The sludge of sentimentality, pre- sented in a prose shrieking with exclamation marks, is perhaps the most intolerable feature of the later sections of The Forsyte Saga. Even in his pre-war work a degree of sentimental evasiveness is apparent. In that wildly success- ful play Strife (1909), Galsworthy appears to be dealing seriously with a social issue—the effects of a prolonged strike in a tin-plate works. But the piece remains a nullity: insight is sacrificed to slick contrivance.
In his final years Galsworthy was wholly given over to flattering the Forsytes of thiS world, as though to placate them for his initial unkind treatment. To the end he retained inviolate those instinctive assumptions of the British ruling class that outsiders find so obnoxious: an effort- less sense of unquestioned superiority and a corresponding condescension: one of the most insufferable scenes in A Modern Comedy is that in which the youngest Jolyon Forsyte en- courages his American wife to 'get rid of her accent' (she, naturally, wants to).
Galsworthy tried to understand, and explain, something of what had happened to English upper-middle-class life between 1885 and 1925. He failed, for reasons which are evident from Mr. Barker's book. The nearest equivalent to Galsworthy's attempt, if on a smaller scale, is to be found in Ford Madox Ford's Tietjens tetralogy. Ford, the cosmopolitan Tory, though an affected ass in some ways, had the understanding and sensibility which Gals- worthy lacked, and his sequence is more penetrating and far more, honest. Nevertheless. the Tietjens novels have been unobtainable for fifteen years: The Forsyte Saga remains in print.
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