Galsworthy at the summit of his efflorescence - there are things which are things

For some reason I had the idea that John Galsworthy’s prose was on the heavy side.  I had had the same idea about Arnold Bennett, but The Old Wives’ Tale was pretty springy, overall.  Rhetorically trimmer than Thackeray or Trollope.  Galsworthy’s first paragraph, much edited here, had me worried:

Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words [uh huh]…. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow from its planting—a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and persistent—one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence. (ellipses mine)

To me, this is heavy.  But it is only, thank goodness, a rhetorical flight, a bit of pompousness to get me in the right mood to meet his characters, many of whom are themselves heavy, rhetorically and in one case physically.  Knocking characters against each other, hopping among points of view, Galsworthy is nimble, faun-like.

Is there a faun in the novel itself?  I am now about convinced that in English novels of this period they are mandated:

The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth!  The bracken grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at summer dusk. (3.1)

This classical encomium to a grove is concealing, or I suppose in its way, revealing, the illicit sexual activity of two characters.  It is another of the narrator’s rhetorical flights.  The previous couple of chapters are written in short sentences, short paragraphs, much dialogue, and precisely employed descriptive language, as with this carriage ride:

A faint odour of glue from the heated horses clung in the thick air; the coachman and groom, rigid and unbending, exchanged stealthy murmurs on the box, without ever turning their heads.  (2.13)

The glue and “stealthy” strike me as particularly good.

In a 1922 preface, Galsworthy writes that The Forsyte Saga “is no scientific study of a period; it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men.”  He means “men” literally, but “Beauty” is curious.  “Incarnation” is curious.  Most of the Forsyte men are art collectors of some kind – one owns, or thinks he owns, a Turner! – concerned with money but beneath that, secretly, aware of something else.

There are moments, too, when, in a picture-gallery, a work, noted by the casual spectator as ‘* * * Titian* - remarkably fine,’ breaks through the defences of some Forsyte better lunched perhaps than his fellows, and holds him spellbound in a kind of ecstasy.  There are things, he feels – there are things her which – well, which are things…  He did not desire this glimpse of what lay under the three stars of his catalogue…  God forbid that he should admit for a moment that there are such things!  Once admit that, and where was he?  One paid a shilling for entrance, and another for the programme.  (2.9, ellipses mine)

Setting the mockery aside, this is the strange heart of The Man of Property, the sorting of the various Forsytes by their sense of the things that are things, and the tragedy that occurs when the thing that is a thing is not a thing, but a person.

not individually, but as a family - so many Forsytes

John Galsworthy must introduce more characters in fewer pages than – well – it seems like a lot.  The first chapter of The Man of Property is a party for the announcement of June Forsyte’s engagement to the poor architect Philip Bosinney, an event that leads, eventually, to tragedy.  The Forsytes are suspicious from the beginning.  “The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family… as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact with some strange and unsafe thing” (1.1).  For all the good is does them.

The important thing is that there are so many Forsytes, ten siblings, age 65 to 86, with twenty-one children among them.  Poor June is the eldest grandchild.  Not all of these people are important, and not all are introduced in the first chapter, but then the third chapter is also a Forsyte party, and so is the fifth, by which time almost everyone is at least mentioned.  The family tree as the beginning of the Oxford paperback is so useful.  And the novel is only 282 pages long; it may have fewer characters than, I don’t know, Bleak House, although it may not, but they are really crammed in there.

Galsworthy is so good with minor characters, whether recurring or one-scene wonders, that he has no qualms about introducing more of them, friends of the family and so on, all the way to the end of the book.  In a great running gag, one of the ten siblings, Timothy, is often mentioned but never appears.  I began to wonder if he was not a figment.

Mrs Small, Aunt Hester and their cat were left once more alone, the sound of a door closing in the distance announced the approach of Timothy.  (2.7)

Then the scene ends with Timothy still offstage, unseen.  When he finally appears, I felt a shock – the line “It was Timothy” gets and deserves its own paragraph, even if the whole thing is an anti-climax worthy of Ford Madox Ford.

For the first third of the novel I wondered if it had a story.  Maybe Galsworthy was content just moving his puppets around, describing their houses and possessions, much like Soames Forsyte enjoys the paintings he collects but hides from everyone.  “Without a habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable – he would be like a novel without a plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly” (1.8).  In the tradition of Trollope and Thackeray, I think I mentioned.  And then in the second third, a story begins to appear, based around a Forsyte’s habitat, the consequences of Soames hiring the unsafe Bosinney to build him and his wife, who does not love him, and never did, a nice house in the country.

There is a B-plot, a happier one, about Old Jolyon reconnecting with his estranged son.  The second chapter of the novel is a pure comedy piece, “Old Jolyon Goes to the Opera,” full of passages like this:

The greatest opera-goer of his day!  There was no opera now!   That fellow Wagner had ruined everything; no melody left, nor any voices to sing it.  Ah! the wonderful singers!  Gone!  He sat watching the old scenes acted, a numb felling at his heart.  (1.2)

But his story really is a comedy, in the old sense, with a rising action, so Old Jolyon starts low and ends high.  Not everyone is so lucky.

innumerable transactions concerned with property of all sorts - John Galsworthy's The Man of Property

For the purposes of these posts, I am going to pretend that there is no such thing as The Forsyte Saga.  No Nobel prize, no BBC series.  Just a single short novel, The Man of Property (1906), from an author not exactly young but early in his career.  It would be another twelve years before Galsworthy thought to write a short story about one of the characters, and two after that before the Saga was conceived.

So for a long time there is just this one novel.  It is in the “way we live now” genre, or I guess the “way we lived then,” since it is set in 1886.  Like Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908, which begins in the 1860s) and Forster’s A Room with a View (1908, contemporary, in a sense), Galsworthy is laying into those stuffy, narrow, prudish, prejudiced Victorians, people not like him.

Like those books, The Man of Property is in the mode of Thackeray and Trollope, with a forceful, opinionated narrator, unafraid of saying something perhaps even a bit cruel about his characters.

Old Jolyon had remained standing while the strong, silent man was speaking.  The speech awoke an echo in all hearts, voicing, as it did, the worship of strong men, the movement against generosity, which had at that time commenced among the saner members of the community. (2.5, emphasis mine)

Although in this case Galsworthy is not exactly criticizing his character, though, but rather his extras (the scene is a stockholders' meeting).  Old Jolyon is, despite his emotional limits, some of them severe, a man of generosity, who loves children.  Even if specific Forsytes are all right, Forsyteism is satirized.  How much of this is too much?  I don’t know.  Francie Forsyte has made a name for herself as a songwriter – examples are given, including music, which is impressive – but in a weak moment she wrote a “sincere work,” a violin sonata.  “They felt at once that it would not sell.”

It was rubbish, but – annoying! the sort of rubbish that wouldn’t sell.  As every Forsyte knows, rubbish that sells is not rubbish at all – far from it.  (2.7)

Forsyteism is commercial, practical, and tenacious.  It is not, in an interesting twist, exactly Philistine.  It has an aesthetic.  Maybe I will push that idea to another post.

The title is employed ironically in a number of ways, falling most heavily on Soames Forsyte, a lawyer with a beautiful wife who does not love him.  He is the main “man of property” in the book.

And those countless Forsytes, who, in the course of innumerable transactions concerned with property of all sorts (from wives to water rights), had occasion for the services of a safe man, found it both reposeful and profitable to confide in Soames.  (2.5)

The Man of Property is a comedy that turns serious, that darkens, much like Howards End (1910) or Vanity Fair (1848), or for that matter The Way We Live Now (1875).  The tragedy of the novel lies in the presence of the word “wives” between those parentheses.  I do not suppose the novel has many readers now who would argue the point, but it is useful – chilling – to see Galsworthy work through a case in such sad detail.