today

I'm sure that it's common that you suddenly feel that a song or a piece of writing is addressed specifically to you. (You know this if you are or have ever been a fan of the Smiths.) I'm reading the first volume of the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, and it's gradually dawning on me that it is a fairly black commentary on the Victorian middle classes, struggling their way into the 20th Century. What is happening in the quote below has happened to me. Different time, different place. Same bewildered middle class boy trying to be an artist. When the dominant discourse is the movement of capital (financial or intellectual) ... What do you make work about?, how do you find a value for your work outside of this discourse?, what's the point?

An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered himself as follows:

'In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they're so scattered; you'll never get the public to took at them, Now, if you'd taken a definite subject, such as “London by Night”, or “The Crystal Palace” in the Spring, and made a regular series, the public would have known at once what they were looking at. I can't lay too much stress on that. All the men who are making great names in Art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and putting all their work in the same pigeon-hole, so that the pubic know at once where to go. And this stands to reason; for if a man's a collector he doesn't want people to smell at the canvas to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say at once, “A capital Forsyte!” it is all the more important for you to be able to be choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since there's no very marked originality in your style.'

[…]

The words bore good fruit in young Jolyon; they were contrary to all he believed in, to all that he theoretically held good in his art, but some strange deep instinct moved him to turn them to profit.

He discovered therefore one morning that an idea had come to him of making a series of watercolour drawings of London. How the idea had arisen he could not tell; and it was not till the following year, when he had completed and sold them at a very fair price, that in one of his impersonal moods he found himself able to recollect the Art critic, and to discover in his own achievement another proof that he was a Forsyte.

from: John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga Volume One, Book One “The Man of Property” pp 250 – 1; first published in 1906 by William Heineman Ltd., the edition that I'm reading published by Penguin Classics, 2001.

What is a Forsyte? The central character of the first three books, young Jolyon Forsyte, defines what a Forsyte is in a conversation with an architect, Bosinney, at an earlier point in the first book …

‘[…] what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property – it doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation – is his hall-mark.’

‘Ah!’ murmured Bosinney, ‘you should patent the word.’

‘I should like,’ said young Jolyon, ‘to lecture on it: “Properties and quality of a Forsyte. This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons and habitats of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of comparative tranquillity.”’

‘You talk of them,’ said Bosinney, ‘as if they were half of England.’

‘They are,’ repeated young Jolyon, ‘half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middle men, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable!’

‘I don’t know whether I catch your drift,’ said Bosinney, ‘but I fancy there are plenty of Forsytes, as you call them, in my profession.’

‘Certainly,’ replied young Jolyon. ‘The great majority of architects, painters or writers have no principals, like any other Forsytes. Art, literature, religion, survive by virtue of a few cranks who really believe in such things, and the many Forsytes who make commercial use of them. At a low estimate, three-forths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes, seven-eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the Press. Of science I can’t speak; they are magnificently represented in religion, in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I’m not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority – and what a majority!’

pp:202- 203