IT is hard for me not to be sentimental about One More River by John Galsworthy (Scribners, $2.50). With its last page there closes the career of a man who wrote superlatively well. Alone of the ‘Big Four.’ he maintained his artistry to the very end. Book by book his eighteen novels were as superior to the commercial fiction of our day as brocade is superior to rayon. As is true of every author whose writing is long sustained. Galsworthy achieved — he would be the first to deny that he had perfected — a style and a pattern of storytelling. When time drew him away from the Eugland he knew best, when the old Forsytes gave way to the modern generation, the pattern of his novels was objected to by the younger critics, whose tendency it is to ‘date’ authors senior to themselves. This criticism, this charge of being slightly out of date, I dare say had little or no effect upon the great body of readers on two continents who recognized in the Forsytes people of their own flesh and blood, and who were intent to read all there was about them.
Galsworthy achieved a style, silk-smooth, keenly selective and sympathetic. The happenings within the pattern of his narrative are warm and alive, almost as if one were overhearing people, attactive people with whom it is so easy to smile or sympathize. The novels, of course, are animated by a running commentary upon contemporary history which will reproduce our time for readers of another century. But chiefly I think they will last by virtue of their extraordinary heartbeat — their great capacity for sympathy, their chivalrous compassion for the injustice of our age. Sir Walter Scott, once comparing his work to that of Jane Austen, said that ’he could do the big bowwow stuff as well as any fellow, but in the portrayal of daily life he was deficient.’ It is in the hearty—as differing from the photographic — portrayal of daily life that Galsworthy is at his best.
In One More River, Galsworthy completes the story of ’Dinny’ Cherrell, the girl who has been the protagonist of his last three novels. Of an old County family and distantly related to the Forsytes, Dinny stands for the stable element in England’s changing order. I don’t know what Elinor Glyn would say about her figure; for my part she has not nearly the physical beauty that was Irene’s. But I do like her pluck and integrity; she stands up to fate, and she always helps the other fellow. She helped her soldier brother out of a mess that involved his honor, and in this present story she has to defend her older sister Clare. Clare, the embodiment of restless, reckless women, makes a bad marriage. She runs away from her sadist husband only to compromise herself with a penniless lover. The divorce court is the result, and very bitingly are the proceedings recorded. It will be remembered that Dinny’s own love affair with Wilfred Desert, the poet, was smashed up on a point of honor. In this new fight Dinny finds forgetfulness, and, though she resists it, is drawn herself into marriage. The romances of the two sisters are thus most skillfully contrasted.
Looking back on One More River, one lingers particularly over a delightful passage on Paris; one savors again the beauties of Galsworthy’s English landscape; one is sensitive to a curious preoccupation with Death in the story. And one regrets that there will be no more.
