BOOK OF THE WEEK

Taranaki Daily News, 12 October 1929, Page 17 (Supplement)

BOOK OF THE WEEK

EDITION OF GALSWORTHY

(By

C.E.)

"A Modern, Cemedv," by John Galsworthy, William Heinemann, Ltd., London, through Avery and Sons, Ltd., New Plymouth. „ Perhaps a good many of the readers of this column are already acquainted with the further fortunes of the Forsytes, for the three volumes which constitute the bulk of “A Modern Comedy” have been published separately. But the numerous admirers of Galsworthy, most of whom, no doubt, have “The Forsyte Saga” in their libraries, will have been awaiting the collation of the new series of stories and their appearance in a companion volume to the one they now treasure and from time to time dip into. The companionship is close. Like the saga, the comedy consists of three average-sized novels, linked up with a couple of “interludes.” The saga took the story of the Forsyte family and its connections and friends right through the Victorian era, from 1886 onwards, and into postwar times, ending ■ with the marriage of Fleur, only daughter of.the head of the family, Soaines Forsyte. In “The White Monkey” we are again introduced to Fleur and her husband, Michael Mont, eon of Sir Lawrence Mont, Bart., and we are carried on from October. 1922. until the death of Soamcs in 1926. Fleur has become a successful London hostess, with rather a mania for collecting celebrities at her gatherings, and the whole of “A Modern Comedy” revolves around her somewhat selfish, sadly spoiled, and yet piquantly charming personality. Beaders of the saga will remember that Fleur a<s a girl was passionately in love with her cousin Jon. son of her father’s- first cousin and her fathers divorced wife, and for family reasons she was prevented from marrying him. Having married Michael, who is a fine young man, but unfortunately cannot quite win her love, she is restless, seeking distraction in a life of gaiety. Before the birth of her son, “the eleventh baronet,” as they call him, she settles down, and for a time she is a model smother and a very desirable wife, so that one begins to suppose that after all Michael is about to come into his own.

But Jon comes back from America with a young wife, and Fleur is affected with a heart storm. She makes love' to her former lover without restraint, but once he has kicked over the traces he realises ivhat it must mean to his own wife, and he says goodbye to Fleur. Rushing to the shelter of her father’s home, she is ready for ’suicide, but instead of killing herself she precipitates a tragedy, her father's injury and death following. That is the barest outline of a story occupying more than a thousand pages of print, for it is impossible to indicate all its) ramifications. Michael Mont undertakes a parliamentary career; Soames and “old Mont” are directors of a big business; Soames interests himself in art' and other things; some members of the family run racehorses; the modern social world in which Fleur moves affords the author many colourful incidents; the great strike, and Michael’s dcsiro to do away with slums open up fresh avenues for exploration. New interests are .continually working their way into the plot, and without obtrusiveness, for it is on the face of it a quite natural story of everyday people that “A Modern Comedy” has to tell.

What is there at 'the root of this great book that makes it appeal just as keenly as “The Forsyte Saga’’ did? Galsworthy is a writer of good English, an artist in composition, but it is not by reason of his erudition and skill as a technician that -he stands out from his contemporaries, though these qualities are valuable enough. In point of fact he uses simpler, and purer, English than that found in the books of many capable writers. But something more than successful choice of diction i«s required to make a long story more than usually readable, and it is Galsworthy's thoroughness —to express the thing in its simplest grips one. Whether he writes of love, of. business, or of mere pleasure, Galswbrthy demonstrates the possession of that aenius which is defined as a wonderful capacity for taking pains. M.' Andre Chevrillon, in ’his “Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare,” describes Galsworthy as a philosopher and poet, “a mystic poet, yet the meet precise and systematic of realists.” M. Chevrillon explains that lie is not thinking of Galsworthy’s manner, but of “the object of his art, determined by his own point of view. It in that of all great artists possessed by the desire to seize and express complete reality, not only that which ordinary eyes perceive, but the deeper spiritual reality, the mystery of which haunts them, the power or the idea they divine beneath the appearance of a being' or a thing, and try to reveal to us by their interpretation of that appearance’.” AU that is done by the. many characters who pass through the pages of “A Modern Comedy” might be told as a mere recital. If it' had been we should have had to regard Galsworthy’s book an a clever satire on post-war social conditions in England, presented by a number of accomplished actors and giving us a detached, even somewhat impersonal, view of an elaborately drawn picture held up before our sight. He is far too real to treat us to a show of that kind. There is reason underlying all the actions that are recounted and the writer, as M. Chevrillon so aptly puts it, brings out the power or ideal that lies beneath. He takes us •right into the hearts and minde of the people whom we learn to know through his pages and gives us a great 4eal to think of. His art truly is interpretative and illuminating. The insight into the things of everyday life revealed by Galsworthy is astounding. There is power and sympathy in his description of the husband and the father awaiting the birth of Fleur’s child, and there is understanding in his • presentation of Michael as a young M.P.