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!