Miltoun is the son of a Lord (also a cabinet minister in a Tory government) whose attempt to get himself elected to the House of Commons might be threatened by his association with a woman who might be divorced. His sister Barbara, a delightfully carefree young lady, is pursued by the very eligible Lord Harbinger but tempted by Mr Courtier, a writer and political radical. As the elder members of the family rally around to fight these twin threats to their privileges, the story evolves into a class-based Romeo and Juliet for both protagonists. Will the younger generation prove independent or will the pressures of the establishment overwhelm love's young dream (and get rid of the lower orders)?
Written in 1910 (the political battle is between the blue Conservatives and the yellow Liberals; there is no hint of a Labour candidate although there is the brief appearance of a rabble of Socialists) and thus with no conception of the tidal waves of change that will sweep the country in the wake of the First World War, this is very much a period piece. The style of writing (it is by the author most famous for the Forsyte Saga, for which he won the Nobel Prize) is Trollopian. Galsworthy's contemporary H G Wells writes much more lively prose. The first part of the book, in which the various dilemmas are outlined, and in which there is a fair amount of action, made for quite quick reading but I got very bogged down in Part Two during which the moral sensibilities of Miltoun were played out in creakingly slow detail.
I suppose it is a strength of the book that in the end I couldn't decide whether the author was attacking the aristocratic caste, who were so wrapped up in their privileges that they couldn't see any other possibility but their own endless rule, or whether he believed that, as one of them puts it, the country needs leading and can only be led by someone whose has been bred and brought up to be a leader.
The book is dedicated to the intellectual Gilbert Murray who married the daughter of the Earl of Carlisle and, I imagine, is the model for Mr Courtier.
- Selected quotes:
- "There was apparent about all his movements that particular unconsciousness of his surroundings which comes to those who live a great deal in the public eye, have the material machinery of existence placed exactly to their hands, and never need to consider what others think of them." (Ch 1)
- "It was for him - as for the lilies in the great glass house - impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings of a flower of the garden outside." (Ch 3)
- "The inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who ... had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned." (Ch 3)
- "Inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas." (Ch 3)
- "A mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others, produced by those foolish practices of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority." (Ch 3)
- "The war would save us ... We should get the lead again as a nation, and Democracy would be put back fifty years." (Ch 3)
- "If people hadn't pasts, they wouldn't have futures." (Ch 8)
- "He meditated deeply on a London, an England, different from this flatulent hurly-burly, this omnium gatherum, this great discordant symphony of sharps and flats." (Ch 10)
- "The preservation of our position as a class depends on our observing certain decencies." (Ch 11)
- "High on the wall ... reigned the bronze death-mask of a famous Apache chief, cast from a plaster taken of the face by a professor of Yale College, who had declared it to be a perfect specimen of the vanished race." (Ch 16)
- "Not specially dandified in his usual dress, Bertie Caradoc would almost sooner have died that disgrace a horse." (Ch 18)
November 2022; 352 pages
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