One More River by John Galsworthy

"No one can spend the night in a car with a young man with impunity.  Can they, Mother?"
   --Dinny Cherrell in One More River (Scribner, 1933).

Dinny is Clare's sister and Clare is being sued for divorce by her husband, Lord Corven, after Clare left him because of his physical abuse (which Clare refuses to divulge to the court).  One More River is the last of the Forsyte Chronicles, three trilogies which began with The Forsyte Saga, and I was drawn to the book by James Whale's elegant film version (see my post of Dec. 7, 2017). Does anyone still read the once-popular Galsworthy, even when the Forstye Saga was shown in 24 episodes on PBS in the seventies?  Is Galsworthy "old-fashioned" and do his books --accurate descriptions of England from the mid-Victorian era to post WWI -- have anything to say to us today? I would contend that in our current era --when history is no longer taught in schools for fear of offending someone --we can and should learn from the past, though Galsworthy's novels are delightful reads in themselves and not, as some contend, made irrelevant by D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.

Galsworthy reminds me of his contemporary, Somerset Maughm.  Both see the good and bad of England in their own time and draw vivid portraits of those who are comfortable with it and those trying to escape it.  As much as one might like to think tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis, (times change and we change with them) there's a wide range of changing and always a great deal of resistance to change.  Galsworthy, in One More River, implicitly expresses the hope that things that need to change (such as the marriage laws) will change and yet will still allow us to appreciate the beauties that remain.

He lay on his back staring at the grass and the bushes and the early sky, blue and lightly fleeced.  Perhaps because he could see so little from that hollow all England seemed to be with him.