The Country House

In “The Manor,” there isn’t the sharpness and clarity of the problem’s framing found in “The Proprietor.” But the author manages to give an imaginative picture of yet another layer of the proprietary society—landed nobility, which also occupies the “top spot.” In the figure of the landowner Horace Pendyce, the author found an excellent embodiment of traits he defines as a manifestation of “pendycitis”: the dull certainty that it was the nobility that inherited from their ancestors and is called to pass on to descendants the right to rule the country; that for this purpose privileged educational institutions will forever supply the state with new cadres; and that this order is unshakable and eternal. Pendyce’s beliefs are formulated in his eloquent “creed”: “I believe in my father, and in his father, and in his father’s father, the gatherers and keepers of our estate, and I believe in myself, and in my son, and in the son of my son. And I believe that we created the country and preserved it as it is. And I believe in closed schools, and especially in the school I attended! And I believe in those equal to me in social standing, in the manor, and in the order that is and shall be forever. Amen.”

Firmly convinced that his class is the bulwark of the state, Pendyce takes on the role of guardian of morality toward the tenant farmers who live on his land. His close contact with Reverend Hassel Barter—“behind whom stand centuries of the incontestable power of the Church”—is entirely understandable. The main part of the novel is taken up by events in Horace Pendyce’s family life: the suffering of Mrs. Pendyce, the author’s favorite heroine, who is not understood by her husband and by their son George—people with a rougher emotional constitution; the turns of George’s love for Ellen Bellieu, who left her husband but didn’t obtain a divorce.

Here the question of family is raised again—about the cruelty and hypocrisy of the bourgeois law of marriage—a question to which Galsworthy constantly returns in his works; in particular, the play “The Runaway” (1912) is devoted to it. But unlike “The Proprietor,” the family drama here lacks significance, as do the characters. In terms of life-likeness, no image in the novel can be compared to Horace Pendyce’s figure.