A Standstill

Saint's Progress — By John Galsworthy

So there is a ‘new school’ of fiction after all! We had come to believe that the phrase ‘to belong to the new school’ had entirely lost its face-meaning, and was nothing but a despairing, lift-of-the-eyebrow joke between the critic and his public, a ‘Heaven knows what the young man or the young woman is driving at, I certainly don't, and I defy you to.’ But no. These wandering students have their roof-tree and their bell. They are a definite body enough for Mr. John Galsworthy to delay his easy progress in the well-sprung carriage on what we might call the early afternoon of his journey, for as long as it takes him to give them a good beating.

But while we are all gratitude to Mr. Galsworthy for putting us out of our doubts by conducting us to the positively resounding portals, we cannot help feeling it is over-severe on his part so to thrust the whole school under the stick….

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When once in a while some literary work of the new school came their way, with its self-conscious exhortations to complete self-consciousness, its doctrine of pure and utter selfishness, or of a hopelessly self-conscious unselfishness, with the querulous and thin-blooded passionateness of its young heroes and heroines, bent on nothing but realizing their unrealizable self through a sort of brain-spun arrogance and sexuality.

Even when we take into account the lively sense of responsibility which a famous and elder author must feel towards the new generation, these are formidable blows, and we are at a loss to call to mind the names of those works, numerous and noteworthy enough to form a new school, which have provoked them. It is certain, however, that Mr. Galsworthy would not have adopted these Draconian methods were he not confident that nothing less would answer. Alas! then, it would seem that we have discovered the new school only to cry ‘Hail and farewell’ to it—only to turn aside, with a shudder, to the old school for our consolation and reward.

The hero of Mr. Galsworthy's new novel is a clergyman, the Rev. Edward Pierson. Let us imagine him seated at his little piano, for his life is divided between love of music and religion. On either side of him stands a daughter. Gratian, the elder, turns from her father to a dark, downright, shrewd doctor of a husband with a passion for argument; Nollie, aged eighteen, leans over a perambulator containing a war-baby—her left hand, shamelessly and proudly uncovered, wears no ring. A dark, lean, travelled Englishman, with a game leg (caused by the war), looks towards Nollie and longs, but there is a woman between them, bent on distracting his attention. Leila (Delilah, as Nollie calls her), in a black silk gown such as Malay women wear, holds up her white arms and presses a gardenia against Jimmy Fort's mouth. She is forty-four, with touched-up hair, and reddened lips, and she is making her last bid for love. Then we have a couple, page 97 Aunt Thirza and Uncle Bob—Aunt Thirza in a lilac-coloured gown,

like a painting of ‘Goodness’ by an old master, restored by Kate Greenaway…. Her inexpugnable tranquillity, unsentimental tenderness, matter-of-fact busyness, together with the dew in her eyes, had been proof against twenty-three years of life on a tea plantation….

—Uncle Bob, who

grew like a cork tree, and acted like a sturdy and well-natured dog. His griefs, angers and enjoyments were simple as a child's, or as his somewhat noisy slumbers. They were a notably well-suited couple.

Further off there stands a Belgian refugee, a painter, in a broad-brimmed slouch hat and ‘a black stock and seemingly no collar.’ He, too, gazes admiringly and sadly at Nollie. Then, compassing them all about, there is

a ghastly company of faces; faces he had thought friendly, of good men and women whom he knew, yet at that moment did not know, all gathered round Noel with fingers pointing at her.

They are Edward Pierson's parishioners. Two more figures and the stage is complete. Upon a back cloth, leading his men, the boy-father of the war-baby spins round, shot through and through; and up in the air, fifteen years away, there floats the sweet vision of Edward Pierson's dead wife. He and not his daughter is the central figure of the book, the ‘saint’ whose pitiful progress Mr. Galsworthy traces. Sincere, sensitive, wistful, dreamy, emotional, we meet him first at Bob and Thirza's country house, where he is enjoying a well-earned holiday. Nollie is there, too, and ‘a handsome boy with a little golden down on the upper lip of his sunny, red-cheeked face.’ Even then, when her innocence is little short of prodigious, when she might almost be eighteen months old rather than eighteen years—

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‘Daddy, your nose is burnt!’

‘My dear, I know.’

‘I can give you some white stuff for it. You have to sleep with it on all night. Uncle and Auntie both use it.’

‘Nollie!’

‘Well, Eve says so …’

—he is distressed for her; he feels she has become ‘a great responsibility’ and sighs that his dear wife is not there to help him. Judge then how his distress passes to dismay when she tells him she ‘can't afford to wait, she “must” marry the young man.’ He has barely signified his disapproval when the elder daughter Gratian telegraphs him to come to her; her husband is desperately ill. He arrives home, and immediately his daughter informs him, in the room where her husband lies between life and death, that she no longer believes in immortality, no longer believes in God. This is a frightful blow to him. Three days later, the husband, out of danger, challenges him ‘to show me where there's any sign of altruistic pity, except in man,’ and, after a most painful fight,

… going to the little piano in the corner, he opened it, and began playing the hymn. He played it softly on the shabby keys of his thirty-year-old friend, which had been with him since college days, and sang it softly in his worn voice….

On page 19, when Edward Pierson is still in the country, Mr. Galsworthy describes his visit to a church—how

it was so long since he had been preached to, so long since he had had a rest! The words came forth, dropped on his forehead, penetrated, met something which absorbed them, and disappeared.

At the time, these words seemed to us remarkable in themselves, but a closer acquaintance with the padre's life immeasurably heightens their significance. Those page 99 words dropping, penetrating, being absorbed, disappearing—must have been a rare treat to him. For it seems that never again throughout the book do they do aught but wound him, stab him, perplex him, or grievously upset and bewilder him, and never again is he preached to; it is he only who does the preaching. Always on the threshold of his lips there trembles a ‘Let us pray.’ What was his life indeed but one long shower of arrows, into which he stepped, bravely, but with ever the wistful thought: ‘Ah, if only I had my dear wife with me now!’ Indeed, if he were not so tragic we would say he is like a man who has lost a beloved umbrella fifteen years ago and counts it sin to buy another.

But with Noel's baby the air becomes too thick. He feels it his duty to have the perambulator in his hall, but the parishioners will not bear it. And he is forced to resign.

The saint's progress is over. We see the stage slowly darken. All the other actors are gone. The temptress has returned to South Africa; Gratian and her husband, happy undisturbed pragmatists, are at work to improve this world. Nollie, even though she has, as her family so gracefully put it, ‘burnt her wing,’ is married to Jimmy Fort; Uncle Bob and Aunt Thirza are—but why need we go any further? The stage is empty. The stage—the stage … the actors are gone….