Maid in Waiting, Maid in Wanting

Maid in Waiting, the seventh novel of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Chronicles, actually turns the focus from the Forsytes onto the Charwells (pronounced and spelled throughout the book “Cherrell”). At first the book felt really different from the earlier installments in the series, not only because of the turnover in the roster of characters, but because I didn’t see the pointed critique of modernity I’ve come to expect from Galsworthy. The dialog actually reminded me more of Dostoevsky, with the characters persistently discussing reasons for and against belief in God. Most characters remain close to a position maintaining that God exists but that, if the horrid reality of insanity is any indication, He must lack all mercy and active care for humanity. This anxious crisis of faith is a central feature of modernity rather than a critique.

But on the second to last day of reading, I got it. The critique begins with portrayals of duty. Living with what appears to be a remote, uncaring God, the Cherrells find daily motivation in a family sense of duty. The protagonist, a young woman named Dinny, helps out a neighbor whose husband has just come home after years in an insane asylum, even putting herself at great risk of bodily harm to do so. Several uncles help Dinny’s brother, who has been accused of murdering a man in Bolivia and stands to be extradited. And Uncle Hilary, a clergyman introduced in the previous novel, constantly helps out poor members of his parish, often serving as a character witness in the trials that come their way so regularly.

But is duty actually duty, a moral imperative based on foundational truth? Or is it a case of humanity doing not God’s work but humankind’s work, taking up God’s slack, so to speak, and attempting at least to do something where He appears to do nothing? Dinny’s brother, Hubert, says that his generation has “seen through things,” by which he means “religion and marriage and treaties . . . and ideals of every kind.” But, he continues, if everyone just tries to grab pleasure, then by competing everyone will make certain that no one gets any pleasure. “All institutions . . . are simply forms of consideration for others necessary to secure consideration for self.” So people have to keep to the traditions; Hubert thinks the traditions merely help people achieve their own selfish ends, but some characters say the respect for tradition is important “for decency’s sake.” Maybe the cynical Hubert is right. But if decency is indispensable, and dutiful service to tradition is all that keeps decency propped up, the habits of the virtuous landed gentry like the Cherrells show the way humanity must live.

And yet Dinny’s dutiful actions don’t actually seem instrumental to achieving her desired ends (even if those ends are met through other channels, perhaps because of Galsworthy’s own traditional sense of the need for closure in a plot). Sir Lawrence says, “Has it ever struck you, Dinny, that history is nothing but the story of how people have taken things into their own hands, and got themselves or others into and out of trouble over it?” There it is. The modern assumption, that God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, in conjunction with an inescapable sense of right and wrong, leaves virtuous people depending on their own human resources to fix everything. Wipe the dust off your hands, Modernity; you’ve got the universe figured out! Except . . . except that history shows that these all-too-human attempts to right all wrongs ultimately fail.

A final, unrelated note. At one point in Maid in Waiting, a missing person is found to have fallen down a well. Galsworthy here calls on tradition in another way by copying very closely a scene from Dickens’s Hard Times!

Almost Exactly What I Was Hoping For

I've wanted to read a biography of the oddity known as "Stonewall" Jackson for a long time. S. C. Gwynne's Rebel Yell was almost exactly what I was hoping for in that it examined a fascinating and historically significant man with a bewildering combination of strong characteristics. I got a gripping story told in abundant detail: here was the tactical brilliance, the Christian piety, the weird quirks, the strict discipline, the hypochondria, the slave-owning, the stated tenderness toward blacks, and the burning desire for the Confederacy to stage a no-prisoners war of city-razing and slaughter. And it was all told in clear and elegant prose.

But although I enjoyed this long walk down a weird, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying path, I did find some irritating stones in my shoe now and then.

Gwynne ends his book with some quotations of praise for Jackson from northerners, including Union soldiers who fought against him. Yeah, that's weird. Americans didn't wake up after V-J day to find newspapers touting the courage of Admiral Yamamoto. We didn't read after Osama bin Laden was killed about his brilliance. And yet Union newspapers, in the days just after Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's death, praised him for his military genius, his bravery, and his Christian and moral convictions. That's super-interesting, and I'm glad Gwynne reported it. But I also felt, after having read the whole book, that the author included this material partly to justify his own admiration for Jackson.

OK, admiring the admirable in your flawed subject is just fine for a biographer. But, as I see it, Gwynne stepped over a line a few times. Consider his statement that Jackson never broke a law. First of all, Gwynne himself tells elsewhere of Jackson breaking the law in holding a Sunday School for slaves. But secondly, can we really say that a person can join a movement that declares its political independence from its mother country and then seize a military installation of that mother country without breaking a law? Isn't the point of rebellion that the rebels have decided they have to break the law and fight to the point that they won't be punished for breaking that law? We must indeed all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately, right?

One of the northern admirers Gwynne quotes near the end said he hoped Jackson's admirable traits could be laid against his betrayal of his country. That's an interesting sentiment to ponder. But it's the only hint in the whole book that Jackson's stand with the seceded states was a betrayal. Gwynne says that, at the crucial moment in April 1865, Jackson saw his loyalty to his state as higher than that to the United States. Come on! Surely at this point in our history, any responsible biography of Jackson (or of any of several of his similarly situated colleagues) needs to point out, at least, that as an officer in the United States Army, he had taken a solemn oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, to bear allegiance to her, and to obey the President. We shouldn't have to expect to read an author telling us with a yawn, "Oh well, he just decided that it was more important to be an enemy than to fulfill his oath to defend the United States from enemies."

But this attitude of treating treason as too insignificant to mention only came to the surface briefly a handful of times. Aside from that, this book was exactly what I was hoping for.