FORSYTE FRAGMENTS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 137, 6 December 1930, Page 21

FORSYTE FRAGMENTS

"APOCRYPHAL TALES"

Fragments of the history of tho elan of Forsytes .between . 1821 and 1918 are given by Mr. Galsworthy in "On Forsytes 'Change" (Heinemann). His Forsytes have now.acquired the.dignity of history,. but. these are "apocryphal Forsyte tales." Excellent reading they are too. In all these stories the reader is .led to smile at the old Forsytes, but the laugh is not always against them: They reveal in such tales as • "Hester's Little Tour," "Aunt Juley's Courtship," "Midsum-mer-Madness,"-and the enchanting "Cry of Peacock" that they are of our ela3', with 'ordinary passions. Behind their stucco facades and brass doorknobs there was no shrinking from life, but scheming.-how'to dominate it. How Napoleonic is the march whereby Eoger Forsyte extricates his daughter Francie from her. entanglement with the "fourpenny foreigner" ..who played the .fiddle! And Mr.: Galsworthy loyally points the.moral. , Francie opined that her father would "have a lit" when he learned of her engagement. But she was wrong and incapable, like all tho young' Forsytes, of appreciating exactly the quality had made the. fortunes of all the old For-1 sytes. In a word, they had fits over small matters, but never. over large, j When stark reality stared them'in the face they met it with the stare of a still starker. reality. ■ ■ In the fine last chapter this quintessential Forsytism is concentrated in Soames as he faces in old age the strain of the war. With his stubborn Victorian distaste for the whole idea of England in a European conflict, and his tenacity in maintaining that she must yet'see the thing through; with his hatred of the vapouring and the panics, and his inarticulate furious patriotism—there he stands, the epitome of a generation. ' We leave him on Armistice morning under the- dome of St. Paul's. . : .