Saint's Progress
By . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1919. 12mo, 404 pp. $1.60.
THE sad, soft music that for poets has clung to the country around Tintern Abbey has been brought by Galsworthy to accompany lovers in the thoughtless hour of youth. Cyril Morland has been unexpectedly called to rejoin his regiment; the Reverend Edward Pierson, Noel’s father, has managed to delay the hasty marriage for which they had pleaded; the stage is set. Rarely is the absolute beauty of vital passion so perfectly realized as by Galsworthy in the whole delicately touched and subtly symbolic episode. In the recurrent mention of the girl’s strange, fixed stillness, as if she were expecting something, we find a touch beyond the most adeptly tinted waxwork of our modern realism. It is by the combination of the romance of the love-scene in the Abbey with the unfaltering realism of the passion of the girl that this scene becomes symbolic, masterful, and wholly beyond the technique that has built it. It catches the unfamiliarity of the empty shell of the church with life, and the possibility of an intense existence as beautiful as the long-fixed order that it supersedes. Around this passionate protest of life against the insensate emptiness of restraint and the inhumanity of war grow the ideas of Saint’s Progress.
So every scene is made of threaded design, delicate, and close-woven always about the poignant fact; every phrase, detail, and character — until one stands wordless and overcome in the presence of a great novel.
The story, like all good stories, drives plainly onward to a logical ending. After the boy is gone, Noel appears on the moonlit road, the unmarried wife of a youth whom war will slay, but death cannot now take from her. She too must face the world in this time of war, the human pack, and — hardest, most bewildering of all — the poor saintly father, who is forever negative to life, detached and ill-protected by a faith which has driven out of him the devil and the flesh, which makes him forgive his daughter, and expect a world unlike himself to do the same. She wants her baby; her sister Gratian, her brother-in-law George Laird, her aunt Thirza Pierson, all lend her every aid and understanding comfort. They pardon her — even approve of her; only her father expects her to gain hard-wrung forgiveness from the world. How this faith drives him out of his church in London, away to Egypt, as a chaplain; how her pure spirit keeps her somehow cleanly fighting, with her broken wing, to the real new human happiness that she is meant for in the world, — to the wonderful possibility of loving the deeply human, war-spun Jimmy Fort, — that is the story. And the Saint, off in Egypt — not since the Old Wives’ Tale has there been so quietly significant an ending as that of Edward Pierson, standing with grains of sand blown against his palms outstretched for help to God.
This is usually plain sailing in a philosophic novel, a contrast to (let us say) The Undying Fire. Yet if ideas had to be sacrificed to interest, no matter for what delight, all would be cheap and commonplace. By the synthesis of life and art, the book simply makes a new state of being for the thoughtful — reflects without loss of a single ray the serious changes, the intensification of life, the inadequacy of old interpretations that brought this war and have been disclosed by it. Readers of any sect, or faith, or lack of it, must mark the margins of this book. Dante boasted that rhyme had never forced him to say a thing that he did not mean; of Galsworthy we may say an even greater thing — that by the work of the consummate artist he says most perfectly all that he does mean.
Such a novel must make us utterly impatient of the routine catechism of fiction. Will it be popular? Is it propaganda; or reform? Is it the most this and the most that that has recently appeared? If the world that Galsworthy portrays were a single person, and Saint’s Progress actually done in thick oils, the world would perhaps admit the astounding accuracy of the likeness, and then, illogically, turn it to the wall. It is at any rate a novel that will test the very basis of the structure of popularity. T. L. H.