Morality in the Forsyte Saga

MORALITY IN THE FORSYTE SAGA FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE THE age of which Galsworthy wrote is dead. Here and there, of course, there are remnants of it remaining; but as a static society it is gone and. buried. It· was one of its characteristics· that it considered itself as static, as the ultimate flowering of a whole civilization beyond which no \prpgress was possible; when they, the Forsytes, a generation of middlemen, · fu~daJ11entally parasites, had, from middle~class people, become the upper class, displacing what they themselves called "land.," they thought them- , selves the n~-plus-u!tra of a development that had started as the industrial revolution; and when the changes came which took their final impulse from the War of 1914, they vanished as a class,·making room for a harder and at the same time softer generation. The age being gone, it is time, perhaps, to attempt a preliminary a~ praisal of Galsworthy's work; preliminary, I say; for it will take decades to clarify the issue; it cannot be done by a wholesale condemnation such as D. H. Lawrence attcmpted.1 For that, the work, when all is said and done, is too ·considerable an artistic achievement, if only in an architectonic sense. It is not the.purpose of what follows to present such an appraisal; my aim is !!lOre modest; I propose to examine one point only, namely the consistency or inconsistency of the system of morality underlying the Saga. Even in such a point of detail it is difficult to say a final word till the age with which a workof art deals is dead; it is only after its death that the , bones and sinews of the work as a purely artistic achievement stand out. Th.at is the reason why the popular use of the word "classic" as applied to contemporary work is so nonsensical. · Homer's age is dead; but his work lives. Why? May one say because, out of his age, he-built enduringly? Because, using the facts and issues of his age like bricks, as it were, he embodied in his structure what is of no special age, namely· the fate of all mankind as such? Being consistent, throughout, in keeping his eye on the wider, the universal issues, he short.: circuited, as it were, the smaller currents of his time, those of the day in which he lived, and assigned them the place in which they as~umed the exact prop~rtions that, viewed sub .rpecit aeternitatis, belonged to them. Behind them all stood the one .great issue, that of human life on earthwhich is the same today as it was at the dawn of history and probably before that dawn, as we should see were it not for the fact that the mist of time narrows down our horizon. In other words, between the m~nor·· issues and the one great issue, Homer held the balance even. He did not take sides, even for his age. He viewed that particular section of human life which he depicted, the war between Trojans and Greeks from a height •v. Phomix, Viking Press, 5:19. . 54 MORALITY IN THE FO~SYTE SAGA 55 suc.h as to make their antagonis·ms a·ppear as minor things, compared with what both Greeks and Trojans~ 'afcer aJl, h~d in common, -their simple humanity. What, to us, today, are the quarrels af Agamemnon and AchiUes, of Hector .and Patroclus, o£ Parjs and Menelaus, ;(Good at tb.e war-cry?" At the centre of what is not static in the Forsyte Saga stands a quarrel, to~: the quarrel between Soames and Irene. What is it to us tod~y? A "Nous avons change tout cela." Have .we? Perhaps. WelJ, al_l the more, then, does the question become relevant. In depicting this quarrcl, does Galsworthy .hold the balance even? For I believe this q.uesrion to be fundam~rital; .on the answer to it d~p~nds, at least in part, the answer to chat" otl\er question whether Galsworthy built enduringly or not. .· . May l touch on a few side issues before I proceed? When we speak of the Fo~syte Saga today...