The Forsyte Saga
Authors: John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
Chapter Iâ“At Home” at Old Jolyon's
Chapter IIâOld Jolyon Goes to the Opera
Chapter IIIâDinner at Swithin's
Chapter IVâProjection of the House
Chapter VIIâOld Jolyon's Peccadillo
Chapter VIIIâPlans of the House
Chapter IXâDeath of Aunt Ann
Chapter IâProgress of the House
Chapter IIIâDrive with Swithin
Chapter IVâJames Goes to See for Himself
Chapter VâSoames and Bosinney Correspond
Chapter VIâOld Jolyon at the Zoo
Chapter VIIâAfternoon at Timothy's
Chapter VIIIâDance at Roger's
Chapter IXâEvening at Richmond
Chapter XâDiagnosis of a Forsyte
Chapter XIâBosinney on Parole
Chapter XIIâJune Pays Some Calls
Chapter XIIIâPerfection of the House
Chapter XIVâSoames Sits on the Stairs
Chapter IâMrs. MacAnder's Evidence
Chapter IIâNight in the Park
Chapter IIIâMeeting at the Botanical
Chapter IVâVoyage into the Inferno
Chapter VIâSoames Breaks the News
Chapter VIIIâBosinney's Departure
InterludeâIndian Summer of a Forsyte
Chapter IIâExit a Man of the World
Chapter IIIâSoames Prepares to Take Steps
Chapter VâJames Sees Visions
Chapter VIâNo-Longer-Young Jolyon at Home
Chapter VIIâThe Colt and the Filly
Chapter VIIIâJolyon Prosecutes Trusteeship
Chapter IXâVal Hears the News
Chapter XâSoames Entertains the Future
Chapter XIâAnd Visits the Past
Chapter XIIâOn Forsyte 'Change
Chapter XIIIâJolyon Finds Out Where He Is
Chapter XIVâSoames Discovers What He Wants
Chapter IâThe Third Generation
Chapter IIâSoames Puts It to the Touch
Chapter IVâWhere Forsytes Fear to Tread
Chapter VâJolly Sits in Judgment
Chapter VIâJolyon in Two Minds
Chapter VIIâDartie versus Dartie
Chapter IXâDinner at James's
Chapter XâDeath of the Dog Balthasar
Chapter XIâTimothy Stays the Rot
Chapter XIIâProgress of the Chase
Chapter XIIIâ“Here We Are Again!”
Chapter XIVâOutlandish Night
Chapter VIIIâJames in Waiting
Chapter XIâSuspended Animation
Chapter XIIâBirth of a Forsyte
Chapter IIâFine Fleur Forsyte
Chapter IIâFathers and Daughters
Chapter VâPurely Forsyte Affairs
Chapter VIâSoames's Private Life
Chapter VIIâJune Takes a Hand
Chapter VIIIâThe Bit Between the Teeth
Chapter IXâThe Fat in the Fire
Chapter XIâTimothy Prophesies
Chapter IXâUnder the Oak Tree
To MY WIFE
I dedicate
The Forsyte Saga
in its entirety, believing it to be of all my work the least unworthy of one without whose encouragement, sympathy and criticism I could never have become even such a writer as I am.
The Forsyte Saga
was the title originally destined for that part of it which is called “The Man of Property”; and to adopt it for the collected chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytean tenacity that is in all of us. The word saga might be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic and that there is little heroism in these pages. But it is used with a suitable irony; and, after all, this long tale, though it may deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict. Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days, as they have come down to us in fairytale and legend, the folk of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and that “family” and the sense of home and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts to “talk them out.”
So many people have written and claimed that their families were the originals of the Forsytes that one has been almost encouraged to believe in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners change and modes evolve, and “Timothy's on the Bayswater Road” becomes a nest of the unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look upon its like again, nor perhaps on such a one as James or Old Jolyon. And yet the figures of insurance societies and the utterances of judges reassure us daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild raiders, beauty and passion, come stealing in, filching security from beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will the essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against the dissolution which hovers round the folds of ownership.
“Let the dead past bury its dead” would be a better saying if the past ever died. The persistence of the past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.
But no age is so new as that! Human nature, under its changing pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and might, after all, be a much worse animal.
Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and “fall-of” is in some sort pictured in
The Forsyte Saga
, we see now that we have but jumped out of a frying pan into a fire. It would be difficult to substantiate a claim that the case of England was better in 1913 than it was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at Old Jolyon's to celebrate the engagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael Mont, the state of England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties it was too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles had been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motorcar, and flying-machine; the arrival of a cheap press; the decline of country life and increase of the towns; the birth of the cinema. Men are, in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.
But this long tale is no scientific study of a period; it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that beauty effects in the lives of men.
The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing beauty impinging on a possessive world.
One has noticed that readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of the saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames, and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur loves Soames as he feels he ought to be loved. But in pitying Soames, readers incline, perhaps, to animus against Irene: After all, they think, he wasn't a bad fellow, it wasn't his fault; she ought to have forgiven him, and so on!
And, taking sides, they lose perception of the simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does. And where Irene seems hard and cruel, as in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Goupenor Gallery, she is but wisely realisticâknowing that the least concession is the inch which precedes the impossible, the repulsive ell.
A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the saga is the complaint that Irene and Jolyonâthose rebels against propertyâclaim spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale is told. No father and mother could have let the boy marry Fleur without knowledge of the facts; and the facts determine Jon, not the persuasion of his parents. Moreover, Jolyon's persuasion is not on his own account, but on Irene's, and Irene's persuasion becomes a reiterated: “Don't think of me, think of yourself!” That Jon, knowing the facts, can realise his mother's feelings, will hardly with justice be held proof that she is, after all, a Forsyte.
But though the impingement of beauty and the claims of freedom on a possessive world are the main prepossessions of
The Forsyte Saga
, it cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class. As the old Egyptians placed around their mummies the necessaries of a future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the figures of Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon and James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little life here-after, a little balm in the hurried Gilead of a dissolving “Progress.”
If the upper-middle class, with other classes, is destined to “move on” into amorphism, here, pickled in these pages, it lies under glass for strollers in the wide and ill-arranged museum of letters. Here it rests, preserved in its own juice: The Sense of Property.
1922
JOHN GALSWORTHY