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(ii) It may be, doubtless will be, urged that the laity would under threat of dismissal demand a voice in doctrine and ritual; and vox populi would come in increased volume to be regarded as vox dei. Such things have happened in all ages and may happen again. The articles of the Church, the rubrics of the Prayer Book, the decrees of Convocation form some safeguards, but the pages of history are full of strange deeds done in the name of religion and of divine right. There can be no adequate guarantee that such will not be done again. When a clergyman, be he high or low, has found his own special niche, whether in a village or in a town, he will be protected by the strong commonsense and intuitive justice of the mass of the English people. The plan of selection and rejection which has been suggested would probably increase the number of right men in the right place; the giving of fuller control to the laity would increase their determination that no injustice should be committed. If their priest be like Chaucer's pilgrim, who

Taught Christe's lore and His Apostles Twelve
But first of all, he followed it himself,

it will be his honour to live the life and to point the way, and he need have little fear of suffering at the hands of his parishioners.

There are possible pitfalls, easy to discern, in the working of any plan. No plan is ideal, nor holds all that is good to the exclusion of every trace of evil and every possibility of misuse. The most perfectly adjusted machine is dependent upon the working of the frail human mind, and may be put out of gear by a speck of dust falling upon an evenly balanced wheel. "There is no morning brightness which does not bring new sickness and desolation." A new method of appointment involving greater control on the part of the parishioners might work badly; but it is unlikely to lead to more mistakes than does the present system.

Certain it is that without a fundamental change in the system of patronage there is little likelihood of that wave of enthusiasm on which alone can be borne those large subscriptions now being asked for from the laity.

С Н. Р. MAYO

THE EPIC OF PROPERTY

I. The Forsyte Saga. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 1924.

2.

IF

The White Monkey. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 1924.

F literature were measured by the ton or the yard, it would probably be found that England had produced more fiction, readable and unreadable, than any other country during the past century. The figures are fortunately not available for those formidable authorities, the economists, who are reported to digest statistical blue-books and even their opponents' controversial writings whole, as the python swallows a goat and a few odd chickens at a gulp; but they would, one fears, prove more of a tribute to the inexhaustible optimism of publishers than to the intrinsic superiority of English genius.

For the most part this amazing trade of fiction appears to flourish, like any other sheltered industry, on the tolerance of a good-natured public, which does not demand too high a standard of its favourite authors. But even in this idyllic land, in which it seems always afternoon tea, there is a competition beneath the surface as keen and ruthless as any on the Stock Exchange. Only a certain amount of money is available for recreation, as for charity, in any one year. If the Society for the Conversion of Blasphemous Bookmakers gets a large legacy, then the chances are that the Association for the Abolition of Academic Art will go short. And if Miss Angelica Jones sells a hundred thousand copies of "Hearts That Beat as One" in a fortnight, then Mr. Marmaduke Quill's great masterpiece, "Her Face is Her Fortune," is likely to be a drug in the market. The one calculates whether she can afford another Rolls-Royce and a third husband out of advance royalties; the other muses over posthumous fame and a gas oven.

From time to time however, a writer appears who triumphs by virtue of quality rather than quantity. Even in these days of crowded mass-production, when almost every author feels it necessary to publish his two immortal masterpieces a year, real genius will win its way against mere industry armed with a fountain pen and a flair for the public taste; and the results are sometimes

paradoxical. Mr. John Galsworthy dislikes property, and abhors competition; yet he writes a great prose epic on the subject of property and, at least for the moment, stands well ahead of all competitors in the current booksellers' lists.

The success is the more impressive because, in one sense at least, Mr. Galsworthy has broken practically virgin soil. He has written a very long book-no less than a continuous series of four novels in one-with appropriate connecting links. Now the very long novel, which deals with life from the cradle to the grave, and with the family rather than the individual, does not really flourish in England. Fielding and Scott, for all their many chapters, give us short stories, writ long, rather than full-length histories. Trollope, Meredith, and Hardy are concerned with the individual, seldom with the family. Dickens might be cited as an objection, but "David Copperfield," like all Dickens' work (with the exception of " A Tale of Two Cities ") is picaresque—as, indeed, life itself is; and "David Copperfield" is really a series of adventures written round the life of an individual. Mr. H. G. Wells tires too soon of his characters to pursue the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation; "Tono-Bungay is his nearest approach to the tome, at least in fiction, and there are no little Tono-Bungays to carry on the tale. Mr. Arnold Bennett, it is true, has written the history of a whole generation in the impressive "Old Wives' Tale," the greatest of all his books; and there are some elaborate trilogies by other writers, which only the printers (and, let us hope rather than believe, the conscientious reviewers) have read from beginning to end. The one real exemplar of the very long family novel is Thackeray. "The Newcomes" would be complete if it did not scamp the marriage of Clive and Ethel at the end; and the Esmond stories are a full-length family canvas, with the descendants appearing casually even in Pendennis and Philip.

But taken by and large, English fiction tends to the episode rather than to the history, to the individual rather than to the family or society, to the event rather than to the problem. These limitations increase its vividness, but diminish its range and depth; in its concrete and practical way, it gives us a section of life rather than a philosophy of life. Outside Shakespeare and Hardy, we have nothing of the pitiless logic that takes fifty years to work out its threads, as in "Les Misérables"; nothing quite

comparable to the elemental vastness of " War and Peace"; and it is significant that while we have tales of adventure by the thousand, we have to go to Dumas for the continuous history of the "Three Musketeers."

Mr. Galsworthy has changed all that. "The Forsyte Saga," with its sequel, "The White Monkey," is not only a very long work, it is a very great work. Perhaps there is only one writer with whom Mr. Galsworthy can fairly be compared-Balzac ; and for this reason, that while the two men are poles apart in treatment, in method, and in outlook, these two are the only novelists who take the business of property, as distinguished from the business of life, seriously enough to describe it correctly.

Your ordinary story-teller knows nothing and cares less about commerce; his characters seem never to be put to the necessity of earning their living, or else they live in some enchanted and unhappily undiscoverable land where banks play fairy godmother to their customers. Even when details are given they are apt to be vague and unconvincing. One has often wondered, for instance, whether Mr. Pecksniff really made a living out of those articled pupils at Salisbury; how Mr. Murdstone could possibly have run the family business in London from The Rookery at Blunderstone; and how Mr. Micawber raised the money to pay his travelling expenses to Canterbury. That insurance company in Martin Chuzzlewit is very nearly incredible; the fact must be faced that Dickens, great in every other way, is no hand at commerce.

Mr. Wells, too, suffers from much the same limitations. Manifestly he understands the drapery trade and, less certainly, patent medicines. But he is less successful when he attempts that strange and sinister world in which bucket-shops flourish and company promoters spin their webs. He can speculate happily enough on the future of society, but is not at home in the kind of speculation that goes on in Mincing and Mark Lanes. One feels uneasily that Mr. Wells, who knows everything else from cockneys to cockleshells, does not quite understand the difference between preferred and deferred ordinaries.

There are no blunders or omissions of this kind in Balzac. We know exactly how each of his characters lives, what the income of each is, and the way the money goes; there are whole pages that read like a company prospectus. Balzac, in fact, takes

VOL. 241. NO. 492.

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the business of commerce as seriously as the business of love, because he finds it as interesting, and Mr. Galsworthy is an apt pupil. He spares us, it is true, the auctioneer's catalogue and hammer-although that should have given him some opportunities of moralising over the impermanence of property. But he cannot resist what most men hate worse than the devil-a solicitor's office. A contract or a codicil attracts him like Circe, and a lease is as sweet music to him as a lyric. It is well that it should be so, for there are, after all, more leases than lyrics in this prosaic world, and more men are concerned with contracts than with cantos. If it is the business of the novelist to represent life the solicitor cannot well be refused admission to his pages.

The resemblance to Balzac does not end there. Mr. Galsworthy has, curiously enough, caught precisely the same trick as the great Frenchman-that love of a vast generalisation built on an inadequate physical observation. One of his characters has "the decided but tolerant temperament that goes with a good deal of profile, fair hair, and greenish eyes"; another is marked by "little lines that stamp her beauty with a coin-like fineness-the special look of life unshared by others." Three young women have "the professional plainness only to be found, as a rule, among the female kind of the more legal callings "-surely a libel on the Temple and Bedford Row. And there is even a peculiar breed of young gentlemen, at once forward and shy, to be found in Regent's Park."

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Compare this with Balzac. In "The Country Parson," the banker's fingers became claw-like from continually handling gold, and "two parallel lines furrowed the face from cheekbone to mouth-an unerring sign that here was a man whose whole soul was taken up with material interests; the eyebrows sloped up towards the temples in a manner indicative of the habit of swift decision."

It is true, of course, that occupation affects character and character will out in the face-the priestly type is the same the world over, while the lawyer's and soldier's trades will stamp two brothers with different facial angles and expressions. But indirect causes and unforeseen consequences elude and undermine the elaborate symmetry of all these generalisations; green eyes are not always tolerant, bankers are sometimes as human as bakers, and solicitors' daughters, as every barrister knows, are occasionally pretty.

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