His lack of complete success as a novelist is partly due to those characteristics which have made him so successful as a playwright. The drama is a lawful means of propaganda, the novel is not—Galsworthy’s plays gain enormously from the social or moral problems at their base, while the same problems have a tendency to constrict or impede the development of his novels. A play is dependent mainly on its craft, for this is a point which lies solely with the author, in which no actor, however skilful, can help him; on the other hand, a novel depends chiefly on its human interest, and this the author must supply himself, since he has no intermediaries to make good where he fails. There is little doubt that abstract ideas do not help the human interest of a novel. It is remarkable how small a part the abstract plays in the lives of even the most thoughtful of us, and anything in the nature of a problem or an idea, of anything belonging to the brain rather than to the heart, has a tendency to destroy the illusion of real life which it is the chief object of a novelist to create.
Another reason why Galsworthy is more successful in his plays than in his novels is that most good plays are founded on a situation, most good novels on the development of a situation, and development is not a characteristic of Galsworthy’s art. He likes to take a situation, examine it from characteristic and conflicting points of view, and show the effect it has on different lives, but he never attempts to develop it, to start a chain of events from it, mould characters by it. Practically every character in a Galsworthy novel, with the possible exception of The Dark Flower, is the same at the end as at the beginning. This means that in his novels he is still a playwright as far as both situation and character are concerned. He develops neither, he never goes forward, he goes round. The result is that his novels are mostly plays in novel form, and they suffer in consequence.
In fact all the drawbacks of the novels may be said to arise from defects in the human interest so essential to a novelist. It is not that Galsworthy does not feel, and most passionately, for his characters, neither is it that they are not flesh and blood, nor that their stories are not real and moving. It is rather because they are types, not individuals, and types chosen to fit some particular situation which has been already selected. They are never mere pegs or mere puppets, but somehow there is nothing creative about them; they lack the individual touch which the actor can impart to a character in a play, but which the author alone can give in a novel. Also they repeat themselves, there is not enough diversity; the same groups arrange themselves in different novels. Of course there are exceptions—Lord Miltoun in The Patrician, Mr Stone in Fraternity—but these, on examination, prove to be only a fining down of the type till it is almost an individual; there is no definite creation.
However, against this defect, which is due to the intrusion of the playwright into the novelist’s sphere, we must set a wonderful and seldom-failing craft, which goes far to justify that intrusion. There are few novelists with a finer sense of form than Galsworthy, few with a finer sense of style—the conciseness of the dramatist teaches him the need of arrangement and the full value to be wrung out of a word. In one point only does the dramatist fail the novelist, and that, strange to say, is in dialogue. Again and again the dialogue in the novels falls flat, or is stilted, or irrelevant—and it is curious, when we remember how strong the plays are in this respect.
There is a certain inequality about the seven novels: The Island Pharisees, The Man of Property, The Country House, Fraternity, The Patrician, The Dark Flower, and The Freelands. In every way the first is the weakest, but, on the other hand, the last is not the most successful. The finest are The Man of Property and Fraternity. Undoubtedly Galsworthy is at his best when his technique is at its highest pitch of excellence, and weakest when his sense of form most fails him. Form is never used by him to cover defects of interest, beauty, or reality. Fraternity, which is very nearly his masterpiece, almost reaches technical perfection, while The Island Pharisees—which is as near as he can go to writing a thoroughly bad novel—is also the most faultily constructed.
The Island Pharisees shows perhaps more than any of the novels the raw edges of his art. He is burning with indignation at the self-righteousness of the British middle classes, and his power as a novelist is as yet too undeveloped to cope with his zeal as a reformer. He lacks too that subtlety of warfare which in the plays and later novels makes his propaganda so effective and at the same time is one of his truest safeguards as an artist—the exposure of a cause out of the mouth of its own champions. He attacks crudely—through a series of events which are not always above the suspicion of pre-arrangement, through dialogue which is often manœuvred and artificial. None of his characters, except Ferrand, the vagabond, has much of the breath of life, and over the whole hangs a fog of bitterness which is scarcely ever dispelled by those illuminating phrases and flashes of insight into his opponents’ cause, which elsewhere make him so appealing.
There is little doubt that if The Island Pharisees were Galsworthy’s average instead of his low-water mark, his position as a novelist would be negligible. But his other novels, without exception, are so superior in technique, in human interest, in beauty, and in force, that we cannot consider The Island Pharisees as anything but the first uncertain step of one who is feeling his way. In The Man of Property we have the same idea—the satire of a class—but it is brought before us so differently that comparison is impossible.
The Forsyte family are representatives of that section of the middle class whose chief aim is Possession. The Forsytes possess many things—they possess money, they possess artistic treasures, houses, wives, and children, they even possess talents; but with them the verb “I have” is of more importance than its object. “This interests me, not in itself, but because it is mine”—is their motto. In many ways they are less heartless, less hypocritical than the country Pharisees; the consciousness of possession brings a certain stamina, a worth and solidarity, which compel admiration. Also Galsworthy has been far more tolerant in their portrayal. The Forsytes are human, they are not like the Dennants; they are undoubtedly types, even their differentiations are typical, but they are types of flesh and blood, not merely of points of view. There is something in the grouping of them too which is impressive. These six old brothers whose god is property have a certain greatness; though they and their lust of possession are satirised in many telling episodes, we feel that nevertheless the nation would do badly without them.
The chief representative of Forsytism belongs, however, to one of the younger branches of the family. Soames Forsyte is essentially the Man of Property, because we see the lust of possession working in him not only through the splendid house he is building, but through his wife Irene. It is in his attitude towards Irene that he declares himself most definitely the Man of Property. He is not unkind to her, he is not untrue to her, but she is his in the sense that the Robin Hill house is his, and it is this realisation which fills her with bitterness and loathing.
Irene belongs to the contrasting group which Galsworthy uses in his novels as in his plays. She and her lover Bosinney stand for all that is antagonistic to the Forsytes. In many ways Irene is one of Galsworthy’s most vivid creations. She is a type we meet elsewhere in the novels, yet she has about her certain elements of originality. Something individual creeps into the magnetic softness, the passion-haunted quietness, which are characteristic of so many Galsworthy women. She is human, and she is in revolt—but not strenuously or effectively. Galsworthy has little sympathy for the strong successful woman, who either defeats circumstances or handles them with capable cunning. In his delineation of June Forsyte, who belongs to this class, he is sometimes reluctantly admiring, but never sympathetic.