On the 14th August, 1867 the English novelist, playwright and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy was born. His most famous and celebrated work was a trilogy of novels, collected and published under the title “The Forsyte Saga”. It is a saga following the trials and tribulations of the Forsyte family.
However it is wrong to dismiss the saga as trivial fluff, light entertainment or a fictional rendering of a cosy domestic drama. It contains a truly profound message. It is a caustic commentary of society, and a serious analysis of the motivations, impulses and inner lives of the characters.
It is almost a portrait of Victorian England itself, embodied within a very privileged but ultimately dysfunctional family. The cruelty, the vicious snobbery and the emotional repression that dominated the culture of England during that time is revealed in unsparing prose. It exposes the darkness beneath the fragile veneer of polite respectability.
Galsworthy’s magnum opus shares many similarities with the work of his near contemporary E.M Forster, who famously implored for us all to “only connect” in his novel “Howard’s End”. This was also a tragic social commentary on class division. Galsworthy, like Forster, believed in the transformative and transcendent potential of love. However love, like every other natural emotion is constantly stifled by the oppressive rigidity of social convention.
Galsworthy was averse to the worship of wealth and fulminated against the concept of money. He found it deeply unnatural. The characters are obsessed with it, almost to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. The Forsytes established a successful firm of stockbrokers, but it is soon revealed that the family have humble roots. There are brief allusions to their ancestor and benefactor, “Old Dosset” and fond anecdotes and memories relating to him are revived during private family reunions. All of the Forsytes sheepishly acknowledge that they owe him an immense debt for their privileged place in society.
Dosset only achieved his wealth through fierce determination and aspiration. However his descendants remain uneasy, and are terrified of losing their money, power and influence in society. They seem convinced that Dosset’s hard work in raising the social status of his family would ultimately vanish along with all of their money and assets.
Galsworthy was first and foremost a dramatist, and his plays provided the main source of his income. This influenced his fiction, as they are written like vignettes for the stage. The most illuminating scenes occur in the drawing rooms of the Forsyte’s palatial homes, but further drama unfolds amidst various social occasions, family outings, engagement parties and weddings. It is immediately striking to the reader that whenever the Forsytes are congregated together, there is a complete absence of familial warmth. The atmosphere is painfully formal. Nobody is prepared to express their true feelings, to do so would be perceived as shameful.
Shame casts a long shadow across the entire family. There are family secrets that could sink their public and professional reputations, namely illegitimacy, mental illness and domestic violence. Consequently every family reunion is an uncomfortable performance and the conversations are stilted. Topics are restricted to banalities. The emotional affairs of the family are off limits because it could spell their ruin.
The elders are cold, and are so repressed that they barely seem human. This contrasts starkly with the younger members of the family, particularly one of the sons who is sensitive, imaginative and artistic. He yearns to escape the world of money to fulfill his creative aspirations. His romantic instincts are sneered at and criticised in characteristically blunt and crude insults. This is a family that perceives everything through a materialist lens. As a result they have no understanding or insight into the importance of an artistic vocation. There is no delicacy or sophistication in their conversational exchanges and the sheer spite embedded within the most officious characters is quite disturbing to read.
Galsworthy felt quite strongly about the superficiality of this rarefied world. There is no authenticity or substance to this family. They seem incapable of expressing their feelings for each other. Weddings are not joyful affairs; they are purely practical ways to consolidate influential connections within the family and the most obvious means of extending the dynasty.
Marriage is strictly a business transaction and detached from emotion as he opines, “in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind”. It seems that any natural feeling has been suffocated by the relentless and almost mindless pursuit of material gain. This remote, functional pragmatism has also destroyed any latent sense of empathy and imagination.
The emotionally barren world of the Forsytes has a devastating and lasting effect on the most vulnerable members. The Forsytes are mercenaries, exploiting everything and anything for profit. One especially vocal and perceptive Forsyte realises that, “Art, literature, religion, survive by virtue of the few cranks who really believe in such things, and the many Forsytes who make a commercial use of them”. This appraisal is the most frank explanation of the Forsyte sensibilities. The cultivation of the soul is literally an alien concept to them.
The human soul has no tangible meaning to the avaricious and grasping Forsytes, in their stubborn philosophy they contend that as the soul has no price then it has no value. This belief is unequivocal and uncompromising, the pursuit of something without worth to them is just a waste of time and effort. These unyielding beliefs seem fixed, as if set in stone. However when a prominent member of the family dies in a suspected suicide it disturbs all of their beliefs. Suddenly all of their obstinacy appears foolish and misguided. Humbled, and shaken they are forced to re-examine the direction of their lives.
Modern literary critics have interpreted the saga as a political treatise. These critics surmise that it is a book primarily about white male privilege, but this ultimately belies the spirit in which the book was written. The Forsytes epitomise a kind of masculine ruthlessness where women have no true significance, and the Forsyte’s rapacious endeavour does extend to the colonies.
However, Galsworthy was not writing a political tract, he was attempting to humanise a society that often felt bleak and dehumanising. It must not be forgotten that although Victorian enterprise helped to build the foundations of our modern society, it was often at the cost of many other things.
Ponderings 