A Family Man, in Three Acts
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1922. 12mo, viii+108pp.$1.00
A Family Man is, more or less of course, a practicable play entitled to a run. It is a steadily diverting comedy of satirical import, involving the presentation of a problem, not to say the problem, of English family life. But for the moment I prefer to find if significant for the way in which it crystallizes the technique peculiar to its author. It is another vivid exhibition of novelist and dramatist as one and the same, an artist who blends fictional method and material into an essence equally serviceable for either medium.
The narrative style of Mr. Galsworthy’s novels, the earliest as well as the most recent, is itself an extension of a dramatic technique. No living English novelist has been anything like so sedulous in cultivation of the playwright’s virtue of selective discrimination as to character, setting, dialogue. A little is made to count for much, for everything; every speech is of dynamic importance. The composition of the novels as wholes is essentially dramatic. Each chapter is a perfected scene, with singleness of purpose and of effect; the few details are those which suggest an entire personality, picture, mood, or philosophy. A Family Man serves, then, among other things, as a concrete definition of Mr. Galsworthy’s instinctive requirements for imaginative literature in general. It shows the overlapping, rather than the demarcation, of two genres.
And the plays are made of the stuff that we find in the shrewdest novels of this generation, including Mr. Galsworthy’s own. This material is simply the conventions, inhibitions, and formulas of conduct of modern, or at least contemporary, folk who are recognizably our neighbors and ourselves. It is the point of view of the outsider, the rebel, that is most sympathetic to the author: yet he never reveals his protagonist — nearly always, by the way, as here, a group and not an individual — with anything less than the justice of insight.
In A Family Man the robels are within the household. Independence is declared by one daughter, Athene, who goes in for Art and free love; by the other daughter, Maude, who goes in for the movies; by the French maid, Camille, who implicates John Builder himself, to the extent of a surreptitious kiss; and finally by Mrs. Builder, who, having seen the kiss, declares she will no longer be a ’wet blanket.’ Builder, like another Man of Property, infuriated at this disruption of the family, goes after the insurrection with a cane, is brought to justice by his own daughter, becomes a subject of jokes and abuse by the public, loses his chance of becoming next year’s Mayor of Breconridge, and in general looks a defeated man. But ‘freedom’ turns out to have been merely a wild gesture; It counts for nothing in comparison with the humiliation of the father and head of the family. And in the pinch it succumbs to that old-fashioned, despised and rejected thing, sheer family solidarity and pride. Athene marries her man. Maude gives up her movies. Mrs. Builder takes her accustomed chair by the fireplace. The Family wins.
HELEN THOMAS FOLLETT.