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<h1> FORSYTE SAGA </h1>
<h3> Volume I. </h3>
<h2> By John Galsworthy </h2>
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<h1> THE MAN OF PROPERTY </h1>
<p><br/></p>
<blockquote>
<p>TO MY WIFE:<br/> <br/> I DEDICATE THE FORSYTE SAGA IN ITS ENTIRETY,
<br/> BELIEVING IT TO BE OF ALL MY WORKS THE LEAST <br/> UNWORTHY OF ONE
WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT, <br/> SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM I COULD NEVER
HAVE <br/> BECOME EVEN SUCH A WRITER AS I AM.</p>
</blockquote>
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<h2> PREFACE: </h2>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, motor-car, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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 realistic—knowing that the
least concession is the inch which precedes the impossible, the repulsive
ell.</p>
<p>A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the complaint
that Irene and Jolyon those rebels against property—claim 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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<h1> THE MAN OF PROPERTY </h1>
<h2> by JOHN GALSWORTHY </h2>
<p>"........You will answer<br/>
The slaves are ours....."<br/>
—Merchant of Venice.<br/></p>
<h3> TO EDWARD GARNETT </h3>
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<h2> PART I </h2>
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