Margery Pendyce is the chief of the contrast group in this novel; with her is Gregory Vigil, the idealist, who looks at the sky when it would be better if he looked at the street and saw where he was going. Unselfishness, quietness, and idealism are the contrasts of Pendycitis. The Reverend Hussell Barter, who is a kind of clerical Pendyce, is one of Galsworthy’s most successful attempts at humour. He is drawn with many a memorable satiric flick, and doubtless this is a reason why he succeeds, for Galsworthy’s humour without irony is apt to be trivial.
Another striking character is the Spaniel John—here Galsworthy has succeeded in giving a dog a very definite personality. John is not only a dog, he is a spaniel—the distinct psychology of the spaniel works in him, and we could never think of him as a terrier or a collie. Indeed the author has taken as much trouble over the Spaniel John as over any character in the book, and been as successful.
THE NOVELS
II
One can say without much fear of contradiction that after The Man of Property the finest of Galsworthy’s novels is Fraternity. Indeed it comes as near being a perfect work of art as any novel ever written. There have been many novels with a stronger appeal, a wider comprehension, a greater depth and force, but few of which it can be said that they fulfil more completely the canons of novel-writing. And this is to be understood not only of the letter but of the spirit—Fraternity is no mere triumph of technique, it is a moving, human and beautiful story, about people who are real, if drawn in pale colours, and situations which are Life, in spite of their elusiveness.
In its perfection of balance, Fraternity reminds one of the plays. There is a central situation, flanked by two contrasting groups. It is not of mere industrial or moral significance, nor is it the satirisation of any particular class; it is a problem which has always occupied human minds, and will do so till the end of time—the problem of the rich and the poor. It is embodied in old Mr Stone, with his great unfinished—and, we suspect, ever to be unfinished—work on Brotherhood. “Each one of us has a shadow in those places—in those streets.” Mr Stone is one of Galsworthy’s finest achievements. In him the author shows what few have even attempted to show, the infinite pathos of moral greatness. There is no denying the greatness of Mr Stone, in spite of his mental kink, and his pathos is as evident. He is alone, it is his own doing; he cannot, if he would, bind himself up with others. He writes of Fraternity, but in life he never touches a brother’s hand—he does nothing to unite those two brothers whose embrace he writes of, and his own life is equally remote from either. They come near him, they put out tentative, appealing hands—and with a wistful sigh he turns to his book.
The Classes are represented by the two Dallison families, the Masses by the Hughes, Creed, and the little model. It is remarkable how tightly the whole fabric is drawn together—Hilary and Stephen Dallison have married two sisters, Bianca and Cecilia, and their Shadows live together under the same roof. We know what would be, with an average novelist, the result of such an effort at concentration, but nothing could be more natural, more inevitable, than the knitting up of these groups.
The little model is not a common Galsworthy type; in fact, she stands almost alone in his novels. Quiet and soft she undoubtedly is, like most of his women, but the meek vulgarity of her little mind is something new. She is drawn with a wonderful sympathy, as indeed are all the characters in the book; for in Fraternity, Galsworthy does not seem to have been so much struck by the irony of his theme as by its pathos. There is one beautiful account of her, leaving Hilary’s house, which sheds a tender light like a spring sunset over her figure, making it at once terribly pathetic and terribly young.
“She kept turning her face back as she went down the path, as though to show her gratitude. And presently, looking up from his manuscript, he saw her face still at the railings, peering through a lilac bush. Suddenly she skipped, like a child let out of school. Hilary got up, perturbed. The sight of that skipping was like the rays of a lantern turned on the dark street of another human being’s life. It revealed, as in a flash, the loneliness of this child, without money and without friends, in the midst of this great town.”
The Hughes group is in its units to be found in many of Galsworthy’s works: the bullying husband, gross, selfish, an animal—but an animal broken—the meek wife who complains and nags, but has at the bottom of her heart an unreasoning dog-like quality which will let her make no effective efforts for freedom; the poor old man, fallen on evil days, yet with a philosophy, and a self-respect which is almost pride. Galsworthy never sees the poor and outcast in an aureole of false idealism. If he sadly confesses that the classes do not know how to help the masses, he also confesses that the masses do not know how to help themselves. If the Dallisons are timid and inefficient, Hughes is an undeserving brute, and Mrs Hughes a scold who is largely responsible for her own ills. The little model is forlorn, but she is also designing. The result is that an atmosphere of deep depression hangs over Fraternity. One might say that its moral was “For rich is rich and poor is poor, and never the twain shall meet”—except in the unfinished book of a cranky idealist.
“Like flies caught among the impalpable and smoky threads of cobwebs, so men struggle in the webs of their own natures, giving here a start, there a pitiful small jerking, long sustained, and falling into stillness. Enmeshed they were born, enmeshed they die, fighting according to their strength to the end; to fight in the hope of freedom, their joy; to die, not knowing they are beaten, their reward.”