The Forsyte Saga - Complete. John Galsworthy

VII.—FLEUR

       VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS

       IX. GOYA

       X.—TRIO

       XI.—DUET

       XII.—CAPRICE

       PART II

       I.—MOTHER AND SON

       II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

       III.—MEETINGS

       IV.—IN GREEN STREET

       V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS

       VI.—SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE

       VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND

       VIII.—THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH

       IX.—THE FAT IN THE FIRE

       X.—DECISION

       XI.—TIMOTHY PROPHESIES

       PART III

       I.—OLD JOLYON WALKS

       II.—CONFESSION

       III.—IRENE

       IV.—SOAMES COGITATES

       V.—THE FIXED IDEA

       VI.—DESPERATE

       VII.—EMBASSY

       VIII.—THE DARK TUNE

       IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE

       X.—FLEUR'S WEDDING

       XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES

Volumes

       Table of Contents

       Volume 1. The Man of Property

       Volume 2. Indian Summer of a Forsyte, and In Chancery

       Volume 3. Awakening, and To Let

THE MAN OF PROPERTY

       Table of Contents

      TO MY WIFE:

       I DEDICATE THE FORSYTE SAGA IN ITS ENTIRETY,

       BELIEVING IT TO BE OF ALL MY WORKS THE LEAST

       UNWORTHY OF ONE WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT,

       SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM I COULD NEVER HAVE

       BECOME EVEN SUCH A WRITER AS I AM.

PREFACE:

       Table of Contents

      “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 fairy-tale 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