Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [11]
Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again…
Or, as the cabbie on his way to Islington said as he frowned at a brace of Indian students on bicycles, his complaint at one with the spirit of Soames and Wordsworth both, “The city isn’t what it was, miss, I can tell you that.” The jeremiad that followed about the effects of immigration on the economy, the crime rate, and unemployment was as old as time, and as literature.
Galsworthy is a better novelist than he is given credit for, and he chooses his settings well. Soames’s sister Winifred lives in a house in Green Street rented for her and her husband Montague, who gambles and womanizes. Green Street is a pleasant and quiet lane off the park, and anyone would be pleased to own one of the houses that line it. But they are markedly less grand than those of the elder Forsytes, clearly the right place for a female child who has married a man of little fortune and uncertain reputation. These are buildings slighter, less chesty, more burgher than baron.
Property is, after all, what the saga is about, and what so many English novels, particularly of the nineteenth century, find of greatest concern. (Galsworthy, like Edith Wharton, is a twentieth-century man who appears to have been becalmed a century before his time.) Americans confuse this with class, since they like to think of themselves as members of a classless society, just as they like to think of their British counterparts as hopelessly immured in a hierarchy hatched a millennium ago. Neither is accurate. It is a mistake to make too much of democracy, or aristocracy. The great fulcrum is industry. At the end of the third book of the Forsyte saga, there is a society wedding at which the family takes pride in the inability to distinguish between themselves, landed bourgeoisie, and the titled family with whom they were now allied. “Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent or the shine on his top hat, a pin to choose between Soames and the ninth baronet himself?” they ask in one narrative voice.
(Or there is this, in a more satirical vein, from Vile Bodies, one of Evelyn Waugh’s hilarious and beautifully mean-spirited satires: “At Archie Schwert’s party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Isn’t this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?’ for they were both of them, as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers.” So much for title in the twentieth century.)
This is apparent in the park, too, in the democratization of place and of fashion. No more are the gentry discernible from their servants by the cut of a jacket, the curl of a wig, the impeccable handle of the right umbrella or briefcase. Japanese tourists conspicuously carry expensive leather bags, while the young English princes are seen in blue jeans and university sweatshirts. Nannies dress as well as the mothers they so closely resemble. No great city will ever be without strata, London perhaps least of all. But they are more difficult to define than ever before.
It was this that Soames lamented when he decried a democratic England, this ability to tell a gentleman by the notch of his lapel. By the time Soames’s daughter Fleur is married, he is living outside of the city, some ways from the house in Knightsbridge where the story begins. Number 62, Montpelier Square, it says, is where he begins his ill-fated marriage