The Patrician is scarcely equal to Fraternity. In it the bitterness, which seemed to have slumbered for a while, awakes, and helps to distort the picture. Also in no novel, I think, is more obvious Galsworthy’s lack of sympathy with certain of his characters. The book suffers in having for its central figure a man whom the author admires but does not really understand. Lord Miltoun is a noble conception, but Galsworthy does not get to the bottom of his struggle. One feels all the way through that he admires him, but cannot sympathise with him, and the result is that the real grounds of Miltoun’s actions are seldom displayed. We never penetrate beneath the surface of this character, whose inner mind we nevertheless would know rather than many whose workings are shown us.
There is also a group, the Valleys group, whom Galsworthy is passionately wanting to treat fairly, but for whom he cannot conceal a bitterness not unflavoured with contempt. Lord Valleys, his wife, his sons, his daughters, are drawn with a painstaking effort to hide his real feeling towards them, but the effort often breaks down; even Barbara, splendid and brave, has a repelling hardness in which stick one or two ironic arrows of her creator. Courtier, who represents the Other Point of View, is sometimes rather vaguely drawn, and suffers in the opposite way to Miltoun, for Galsworthy, while apparently sympathising with his attitude, does not seem to have the same admiration for his character.
The only person in the book who is both admired and understood is Mrs Noel. Here we have a very appealing figure, tragic yet quiet, courageous yet soft, made for love, vibrant with passion, full of an infinite delicacy and self-respect. Self-respect is an unfailing characteristic of Galsworthy’s good women; he has no sympathy with the woman who in times of stress loses her personal dignity, and forgets all those little trivial refinements of body which are part of her greatness. Audrey Noel “incorrigibly loved to look as charming as she could; and even if no one were going to see her, she never felt that she looked charming enough.” He realises that for a woman who respects herself it is not enough to be merely clean and tidy, she must be as beautiful as circumstances will allow—it is not vanity but her dignity which demands it. Mrs Noel appeals because her courage is so infinite, and because it is so essentially a woman’s courage, a thing of gentleness and soft endurance, not of the stiff but of the smiling lip.
There is a certain unsatisfactoriness in the tragedy of her relations with Miltoun. He falls from his ideal, but only half-way, so to speak—the rest of his difficulty is solved by her abnegation. One is given the impression, in spite of much talking between the characters, that the vital heart of the matter has never been reached. “If the lark’s song means nothing—if that sky is a morass of our invention—if we are pettily creeping on, furthering nothing—persuade me of it, and I’ll bless you.” That desperate cry of Miltoun seems to give more of the essence of his struggle than any arguments about Religion and Authority. One feels that both were only names on lips—it was not merely a respect for authority that made Miltoun first deny himself Audrey, and then when he had taken her, believe himself bound to throw aside his public life. The appeal of Authority is not made convincing enough, the appeal to Religion not spiritual enough, for a man of Miltoun’s type—one sees him acting, generally at least, according to the dead letter of both; one knows there must have been a quickening spirit behind to drive such a man, but one is not shown it.
The Dark Flower is in some ways a departure from his usual methods. It lacks the central problem, with its balanced and contrasted groups. It is not a study of a situation nor of a class; it is a study of passion. There has always been plenty of passion in Galsworthy’s books; he is not a cold writer, and though his central idea is often social or intellectual, in his treatment of it he never loses sight of the fact that human emotions are stronger than human intellects, and play a more important part in all situations, no matter how purely technical and general these may appear. But in The Dark Flower, passion is not an incident or a moulding force, it is the central theme. We are shown its growth in three different stages—its first kindling in the heart of a boy, its consummation in the young man and woman, its last flicker in the man who sees old age approaching and to whom youth calls.
To carry out his idea Galsworthy is forced to put aside much of that compactness which is so effective in his other novels. Indeed The Dark Flower is really three separate stories, of which the hero, Mark Lennan, is the connecting link. A really fine character might have held these three episodes together, but Lennan is vaguely drawn. He is most convincing as boy and middle-aged man; in the central part he is swamped in the vehemence of his own love. Indeed the passion of Lennan and Olive Cramier is far the greatest thing about them—taken apart from it they are both a little colourless. Olive is much less life-like than Audrey Noel, Irene Forsyte, and others of her kind; she is vague and shadowy beside the heroines of the two other episodes, Anne Stormer and Nell Dromore.
These women are in many ways the best-drawn characters in the book. Anne Stormer, caught on the fringe of middle age by the gust of her passion for a boy of eighteen, swept by it, rocked by it, but conscious all the time of its hopelessness with regard to herself, its cruelty with regard to him, in the end gives him up to the little girl of his own age, with whom he climbs trees, and in whose presence he forgets the dark flower whose scent in her bosom had given him his first staggering draught of life. She is a character fine through her pathos, through the inevitableness of her renunciation, which is not made from any high spirit of courage or self-sacrifice, but simply because she must.
Very different is Nell Dromore, who sends the mocking cry of youth after Lennan when, having passed through the storm of his love for Olive Cramier, and married his boyhood’s playfellow, Sylvia Doone, he sees old age creeping towards him, passionless and adventureless. She is an extraordinary study of mingled abandonment and innocence. She leads him on by methods which would not disgrace a courtesan if they had not about them all the delicious shamelessness of a child. In the end he has the strength to wrench himself from her, knowing that she brings him but a false hope, for which his wife’s broken heart must pay. Sylvia, though winning and sweet in the first episode, is rather shadowy here, where she has such an important part. No doubt her ineffectiveness is to a certain extent deliberate, but for all that it should not be unreal, or we lose sight of it as a force in Lennan’s struggle.
On the whole it must be said that Galsworthy is at his best when most characteristic, and here, where he turns to the methods of the more ordinary novelist, he loses some of his strength. There are, however, some impressive scenes in the book, and he has again shown his peculiar successfulness in dealing with youth and young love. There are delightful pictures of the boy Mark, in which his growing, half-understood infatuation is never allowed to drown the frankness of his youth; and the scenes between him and Sylvia remind us of similar scenes in Joy.
In The Freelands, Galsworthy reverts to the more characteristic mood; indeed the book is reminiscent—in a stimulating, legitimate way. Its structure reminds one of The Man of Property, and its environment of The Country House. As in the first of these the web was spun over the framework of the six brothers Forsyte, so here we have the four brothers Freeland to serve as pegs—and they live in circumstances that recall the Pendyces and their problems. Not that they are all four country people—Felix is a successful author and lives at Hampstead, and John is in the Home Office; but the family meets at Becket, where Stanley who has made a fortune by exporting ploughs, has an estate, and Tod, the eccentric and revolutionary, lives the simple life, freehold.