The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

THE most, accomplished English novelist now alive, John Galsworthy can look back on a performance ranging from short stories, such as the Five Tales, to his hard-hitting essays on the cruelties of English hunting; from plays, such as Loyalties and Old English, to that long shelf of purple-bound novels of which The Forsyte Saga is his most noble and enduring work. Since 1906 (when The Man of Property appeared) we have had each year a ‘new’ Galsworthy volume, a ‘new’ Galsworthy play; and as his writing has increased in body, so has it advanced in its knowledge of people and of the social injustice from which so many have suffered. An uncommon interval preceded this, his latest novel; to it we turn, confident of those Galsworthy qualities, pity and warmth of character, and aware, too, of his earlier English folk who live on in the mind of the reader and with whose stories this new one will inevitably be compared.