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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books by John Galsworthy offers a profound exploration of the English bourgeoisie at the turn of the 20th century, encapsulated in the lives of the Forsyte family. Through a rich, descriptive narrative style, Galsworthy employs realistic dialogue and intricate character development to portray themes of wealth, inheritance, and the shifting dynamics of social class. The interconnected stories, written in the context of Edwardian England, serve not only as a family saga but also as a critique of materialism and the moral dilemmas facing the upper-middle class in a rapidly changing society. John Galsworthy, a novelist and playwright, was deeply influenced by his own experiences within a wealthy family that struggled with issues of duty and desire. His background and legal education allowed him to critique the societal norms that govern his characters. Galsworthy's dedication to social reform and his conviction in the responsibility of the artist are palpable throughout the collection, making it a significant reflection of his time and personal beliefs. This masterful collection is highly recommended for readers who appreciate intricate narratives peppered with social commentary. Galsworthy's deep insights into human relationships and societal structure provide not just entertainment but also a thought-provoking perspective on the nature of inheritance'—both material and emotional. Readers seeking a blend of elegance in prose and depth in thematic exploration will find themselves captivated by this complete edition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers the complete narrative arc of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte world, presenting the three principal trilogies—The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy, and End of the Chapter—together with their linking interludes and the companion stories of On Forsyte ‘Change. Its purpose is to offer a unified, continuous reading of a family chronicle that traces prosperity, pride, and private emotion across changing English society. By assembling the nine core novels in their intended sequence and preserving the interludes that bridge shifts in time and tone, the volume provides both coherence and momentum, allowing readers to experience the design and development of the cycle as a single, living whole.
The contents encompass long-form realist novels, shorter interludes that function as novellas or extended episodes, and a suite of related short stories. The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let establish the initial trilogy; The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, and Swan Song continue the saga; Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River (One More River) complete the nine-novel design. Interludes—Indian Summer of a Forsyte, Awakening, A Silent Wooing, and Passers By—supply tonal and narrative transitions. On Forsyte ‘Change contributes concise tales situated within the same milieu. The collection, therefore, concentrates on narrative fiction rather than essays, poems, diaries, or plays.
At its outset, the saga observes a prosperous London family whose unity derives from property, prudence, and the management of appearances. The premise is intimate yet expansive: private choices reverberate through households, law courts, dining rooms, and drawing rooms, while the aura of success both shelters and constrains. The narrative begins in late-Victorian confidence and, over time, encounters new social climates. Across branches and generations, the Forsytes consider how to secure fortune, arrange marriages, and maintain status, even as personal sentiment complicates settled plans. The novels balance closely observed domestic scenes with the wider currents of class, taste, and institutional power.
Galsworthy’s hallmark is lucid, poised realism enriched by understated irony and moral tact. He favors a flexible third-person narration, attentive to shifting viewpoints without sacrificing clarity. Characters are revealed through gesture, dialogue, and scrupulous social detail—architecture, dress, business habits, and the quiet signals of manners. The prose moves with measured intelligence, allowing felt experience to register alongside public ritual. Interludes serve as a pause and a lens, altering scale to capture a season, a mood, or a delicate turning-point. The effect is cumulative: a mosaic that builds sympathy and judgment gradually, refusing melodrama while permitting emotion to emerge unmistakably.
Unifying themes bind the entire cycle. Property, both literal and symbolic, becomes a test of identity and a measure of security, while the law—contracts, inheritance, marriage settlements—exposes the gap between formal rights and human need. Artistic aspiration and commercial calculation contend for authority; tradition negotiates uneasily with metropolitan modernity. Generational change recurs, as children inherit not only capital but also habits, scruples, and blind spots. Gender expectations and social surveillance shape choices and reputations. Throughout, the books pose practical ethical questions: what may be owned, what should be yielded, and how far a person’s duty extends to family, self, and society.
The first trilogy lays the groundwork for tone, motif, and structure. The Man of Property situates the family amid solid houses and firm opinions, exploring the pressures that arise when personal feeling touches the edges of respectability. Indian Summer of a Forsyte offers a tender, autumnal interlude that reframes the opening movement in a quieter key. In Chancery brings legal and domestic entanglements into sharper relief, while Awakening registers a fresh sensibility ready to inherit the stage. To Let concludes the initial cycle’s central tensions without breaking the thread of continuity, leaving the social and emotional questions poised for renewal and reconsideration.
A Modern Comedy extends the story into a brisk, volatile climate. The White Monkey traces postwar unease and the interplay of new money, new art, and old instincts. A Silent Wooing bridges toward The Silver Spoon, where the idiom of business, politics, and the press amplifies the theme of reputation in a swiftly moving age. Passers By catches fleeting encounters and undercurrents, clearing the way for Swan Song to register both persistence and change in family and nation. The trilogy sharpens satire without abandoning sympathy, showing how the Forsyte inheritance adapts—imperfectly—to fashions in taste, publicity, and personal independence.
End of the Chapter widens the lens to connected circles and questions of honor under public scrutiny. Maid in Waiting introduces a milieu where duty, loyalty, and conscience meet the demands of a modern world. Flowering Wilderness develops the contrast between outward form and inward conviction, considering what it means to choose under pressure. Over the River (One More River) pursues the intersection of personal integrity and the social codes that both protect and compromise it. Together, these novels complete the long arc while maintaining the signature balance of social observation and psychological poise that characterizes the earlier movements of the cycle.
The interludes are pivotal to the collection’s architecture. Each offers a tonal hinge—a respite, a close-up, or a brief lateral glance—that sustains continuity without heavy exposition. Indian Summer of a Forsyte casts retrospective light with gentle dignity; Awakening delicately registers the emergence of new feeling; A Silent Wooing and Passers By place quiet emphases that recalibrate relationships and prepare transitions. Their brevity conceals structural force: they preserve rhythm, carry forward motifs, and deepen character without announcing grand events. By alternating scale and tempo, the interludes keep the narrative supple, ensuring that the larger volumes never lose contact with intimate experience.
On Forsyte ‘Change complements the trilogies with independent stories drawn from the same world. These pieces illuminate earlier episodes and side-lights, often revealing how habits of mind—thrift, pride, discretion—took root. The shorter form permits sharper contrasts of tone: irony can be brisk, pathos can be compressed, humor can surface swiftly. Settings vary within the familiar social map, and the tales enrich the genealogy of motives that the longer novels explore at leisure. As companion work, this collection adds breadth and texture, filling out the lore of the family and clarifying how minor turns of fortune echo across a larger inheritance.
One of the saga’s abiding strengths is its social topography. It moves with equal ease through chambers and drawing rooms, London squares and suburban villas, art galleries and clubs, country gardens and offices. Small ceremonies—meals, visits, letters, consultations—carry moral weight, while legal and financial routines shape possibilities without overwriting personality. The background shifts with the times, but the foreground remains attentive to how people speak, hesitate, and decide. This interplay yields a historically resonant portrait of the English upper-middle class in motion, not as a museum piece but as a living fabric of ambitions, scruples, pleasures, and regrets.
Read as a whole, the collection remains significant for its clarity of design and depth of sympathy. It holds critique and compassion in careful balance, neither excusing nor caricaturing the appetites that drive success. The prose is elegant without ostentation; the psychology is exact without intrusion. Themes of possession, loyalty, and change continue to speak to readers who navigate their own versions of security and desire. By uniting the nine core novels with their interludes and companion stories, this edition invites an immersive experience: a sustained encounter with a world that mirrors its age while illuminating the durable patterns of private life.
Author Biography
John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright whose career bridged the late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar periods. Best known for The Forsyte Saga, he became a central voice in British literary realism, anatomizing the values and fault lines of the upper‑middle class with lucid prose and measured irony. His dramas confronted social questions with comparable force. Recognized internationally for a sustained body of work across fiction, drama, and essays, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in the early 1930s. Today he is read both as a consummate storyteller and as a key chronicler of English society in an era of accelerating change.
Galsworthy was born in the late 1860s in Surrey, England, and educated at prominent institutions, including a leading public school and Oxford. Trained for the law and called to the bar, he initially considered a legal career before turning to literature. Travel broadened his horizons, and during a sea voyage in the 1890s he befriended Joseph Conrad, an encounter often noted in accounts of his early development. Galsworthy’s formation placed him within the English realist tradition, while European drama of ideas helped shape his later stagecraft. He brought to writing both the observational habits of legal training and a reformer’s sensitivity to social inequities.
Galsworthy’s first publications appeared in the late 1890s under the pseudonym John Sinjohn, including short fiction and a debut novel. Early experiments established recurring interests: the claims of property, conflicts between personal desire and social obligation, and the pressures of modern institutions. In the early 1900s he began publishing under his own name, refining a style notable for restraint and moral nuance. This transition marked a move from apprentice work to the broader social canvases that would define his reputation. Criticism increasingly recognized his steady, dispassionate narration and capacity to render motivations from multiple angles without melodrama, a quality that would anchor his major cycles.
The Forsyte Saga became his signature achievement. Beginning with The Man of Property in the first decade of the twentieth century and continuing through subsequent volumes and interludes, the sequence charts a prosperous family over years of prosperity, strain, and adjustment to shifting norms. Without resorting to polemic, Galsworthy probes the entanglements of wealth, taste, and conscience, and the costs of treating people as forms of possession. The work earned wide readership for its blend of social panorama and intimate psychology. Its quiet irony, architectural plotting, and sustained character studies made it a touchstone for readers seeking a realist epic of modern English life.
Alongside fiction, Galsworthy found a second vocation in the theater. Plays such as Strife, Justice, The Skin Game, and Loyalties exemplified his commitment to dramatizing public issues—industrial conflict, flaws in the penal system, class antagonisms, and prejudice—through tightly constructed, ensemble-driven scenes. These works avoided sensationalism, inviting audiences to weigh competing claims rather than accept easy verdicts. Produced widely in London and beyond, they brought Galsworthy prominence as a dramatist whose humane skepticism and ethical clarity shaped public debate. Critics valued his even-handedness and craftsmanship, while contemporaries recognized that the plays’ concern for fairness and dignity extended his prose themes into civic space.
Galsworthy extended his family chronicle in later cycles. A Modern Comedy followed the next generation in the 1920s, and End of the Chapter continued related narratives into the early 1930s. He also published essays and short stories, maintaining an output marked by balance and social conscience. Beyond the page, he helped shape international literary life as the first president of PEN International, advocating collegial exchange and writers’ freedoms. In the early 1930s he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoring the distinguished art of narration that had made him emblematic of English realism even as high modernism recast the critical conversation around the novel.
In his final years, Galsworthy continued to write, consolidating a legacy that would endure well beyond his death in the early 1930s. Posthumously, his reputation remained strong with general readers, and The Forsyte Saga enjoyed renewed popularity in adaptations, notably a landmark BBC television series in the late 1960s and another major revival in the early 2000s. Scholars read him today as a precise recorder of class, property, and ethical responsibility in modern Britain. His plays reappear for their probing of institutional justice, while his fiction stands as a sustained meditation on change and continuity, offering insight without sacrificing narrative pleasure.
Historical Context
John Galsworthy’s Forsyte narratives unfold across the late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar decades, roughly from the 1880s to the early 1930s, when Britain’s social and economic hierarchies were intensely contested. Born on 14 August 1867 at Kingston Hill, Surrey, educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford (B.A. 1889), and called to the Bar in 1890, Galsworthy brought a lawyer’s eye for institutions and precedent to fiction. He began publishing in the 1890s, meeting Joseph Conrad in 1893 aboard the Torrens, and matured as an Edwardian realist. The nine books trace a family’s worldliness amid national transformations: property defined identity, the law cut deep into private life, and modernity pressed on habit.
The late Victorian property regime shaped the Forsyte imagination. Settlements and trusts, protected by the Settled Land Act (1882), preserved capital within families, while the Estate Duty of 1894 (Sir William Harcourt) began to chip away at intergenerational hoards. London was the crucible: speculative building stretched west and south, from Park Lane and Mayfair to Kensington and the Thames suburbs at Richmond and Putney. A mania for real estate made addresses social emblems, as leases, ground rents, and mortgages tied status to bricks and leases. “Man of property” was a legal as well as a psychological category, linking prudence, risk, and taste to the deep grammar of Victorian wealth.
Marriage and divorce law supplied the era’s strict frame for private conduct. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 shifted divorce from ecclesiastical courts to a civil forum; yet asymmetry persisted until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1923 narrowed the gender gap in grounds for divorce. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) allowed wives to own and control property, unsettling patriarchal settlements. The Courts of Chancery (fused procedurally by the Judicature Acts 1873–1875) and, after 1875, the High Court’s Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, centered in the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand (opened 1882), made legal redress visible. “In Chancery” was both modern experience and Dickensian echo, binding family strategy to equity.
Class in Britain, circa 1886–1931, meant not only aristocracy versus bourgeoisie, but older landed certainties confronting professional, financial, and commercial dynamism. Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform agitation (from 1903), the Liberal landslide of 1906, and the People’s Budget of 1909 (David Lloyd George) brought progressive taxation and land values into politics. The Parliament Act 1911 curtailed the Lords’ veto. After 1918, death duties, inflation, and agricultural depression forced estate sales on a massive scale, unseating county dynasties and swelling suburban freeholds. Kinship, settlement, and inheritance—once shields of continuity—became contingent, as the market appraised pedigree, taste, and liquidity alike. Houses were no longer merely homes; they were adjudicated futures.
Imperial climax and war shaped generational change. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) unsettled confidence in imperial righteousness and accused class leadership; the Great War (1914–1918) then remade everything. Mobilization, the 11 November 1918 Armistice, and demobilization exposed the limits of deference. The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 darkened the peace. Veterans returned to a nation of shortages, strikes, and new political formations. The Forsyte time-span follows this shift: heirs raised on certainty faced rationing, grief, and redistributions. Old art, old houses, and old marriages met fresh claims for pleasure, speed, and autonomy. The war’s ledger—debt, taxation, and mourning—revalued ownership and intensified scrutiny of the moral uses of capital.
Consumer culture and urban pleasure reframed respectability. The West End’s theatres and clubs, department stores like Harrods and Selfridges (opened 1909), and new restaurants democratized spectacle. London drawing rooms competed with auction rooms—Christie’s (Pall Mall, established 1766) and dealers catering to American collectors (J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick)—as painting and porcelain became portable social currency. The Gaiety and musical comedy glamorized display; Pall Mall and St James’s Street maintained clubland’s gatekeeping. Taste thus worked as arbitrage between tradition and novelty. Interiors, wardrobes, and collections orchestrated selfhood. In this milieu, “good form” was a ledger entry and a creed, where purchase validated personhood even as critics deplored commodified feeling.
Art and letters divided between Edwardian realism and experimental modernism. Galsworthy—publishing The Man of Property in 1906 and expanding the cycle from 1918 to 1933—stood with Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells in chronicling social process. Roger Fry’s “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” at the Grafton Galleries (1910–1911) introduced a new visual grammar that unsettled collectors reared on Sargent and Whistler. The Bloomsbury Group pressed formal innovation, while periodicals and circulating libraries secured mass readerships for social fiction. The shift from serialized Victorian omniscience to fractured interiority created a cultural debate Galsworthy engaged by breadth rather than by stream of consciousness, using family saga to test competing aesthetics, ethics, and appetites.
Technology accelerated the tempo of life and altered class boundaries. The Motor Car Act 1903, taxicabs with meters (1907), and Underground expansion (Central line 1900; Piccadilly 1906; Bakerloo 1906) made London small and suburbs viable. Telephones, electrification, and gramophones domesticated modernity; the British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922, spreading the BBC’s voice into drawing rooms. Cinemas multiplied, reframing romance and scandal as public commodities. Motor tours to Surrey and Sussex reconfigured courtship and privacy, while accidents, speed limits, and insurance brought law to leisure. The Forsyte world navigates these utilities as both enchantments and intrusions, where the clock, the timetable, and the wireless conspire against secrecy and slow time.
Women’s roles changed within one long generation. The “New Woman” challenged Victorian domestic ideology; the Women’s Social and Political Union (1903) dramatized suffrage claims; the 1913 Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act—the “Cat and Mouse Act”—and wartime service altered public sympathy. Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised some women over 30; the Equal Franchise Act 1928 aligned women’s voting age with men’s at 21. Work during 1914–1918, coupled with the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 and evolving divorce law, created new leverage inside marriage and out. Social codes lagged behind statutes, however, and reputations could not be restored by law alone. Fiction found drama in these disjunctions.
Business cycles tested propriety. The Baring crisis of 1890 warned of global interdependence; the gold standard anchored credibility until wartime finance broke it. Returning to gold at $4.86 under Winston Churchill’s 1925 budget overvalued sterling, pressuring exporters and employment. The 1920–1921 slump and the General Strike of May 1926 dramatized industrial disequilibrium, culminating in sterling’s departure from gold in September 1931 amid world depression. The City of London’s merchant banks, insurance houses, and brokers navigated risk through family networks and law. Such turbulence regraded commercial honor: speculation versus stewardship, publicity versus discretion. The interwar comedy of manners thus played out against serious macroeconomic scripts.
Reputation, law, and the press formed a triangle of power. English libel—shaped by the Libel Act 1843 and the Judicature Acts—gave juries broad sway over damages, while press lords, notably Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe, Daily Mail from 1896), popularized scandal. The new tabloids, rising circulation, and cheap advertising created incentives to test the boundaries of privacy. Society columns, gossip, and rumor were not mere entertainment; they were market signals that could move art prices, marriages, and seats in Parliament. In such a climate, family names were assets under perpetual audit. Fiction could treat a lawsuit as both a plot engine and an x‑ray of class conscience.
Urban planning and housing reform reframed the metropolis. The London County Council (established 1889) became a modernizing force, while the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890 and garden suburb experiments (Hampstead Garden Suburb, 1907) altered the city’s edges. Rail suburbs prospered; building societies financed semi-detached respectability; leases and covenants disciplined taste. Riversides—from Battersea to Richmond—became sites of aspiration and escape. Country houses in Surrey and Sussex faced new taxes, new roads, and new buyers. The townhouse and the villa formed a dialogue between display and retreat. “Home” thereby migrated from inherited enclosure to curated achievement, and the river, train, and deed recorded that movement’s legal, visual, and emotional costs.
Religion and moral sentiment shifted from Victorian certitude to interwar ambivalence. The Church of England remained an establishment presence—baptisms, weddings, funerals still punctuated class ritual—yet Nonconformist ethics shaped Liberal politics, and agnosticism widened among intellectuals. The theatre remained under the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship until 1968, constraining stage treatments of sexuality and blasphemy; fiction negotiated what the stage could not. Double standards persisted in adulterous scandal and divorce stigma, even as statute law softened inequities. Moral authority splintered: science, psychology, and secular philanthropy challenged clerical counsel. The novels situate conscience amid these cross-pressures, asking how honor survives when doctrine loosens and when taste, not faith, often polices behavior.
Galsworthy’s social activism through drama strengthened his novelistic conscience. The Silver Box (1906) scrutinized class justice; Justice (1910), produced with the Stage Society and allied with Harley Granville Barker’s movement at the Royal Court, galvanized opinion on prison reform, prompting Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary (1910–1911), toward ameliorations. Galsworthy helped found PEN in 1921 with Catherine Amy Dawson Scott and served as president until 1932, championing freedom of expression across borders. He declined a knighthood in 1917, accepted the Order of Merit in 1929, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. These commitments nourish the novels’ ethical texture, where property, publicity, and punishment are never merely private matters.
Publishing and readership conditions favored the family saga. The Net Book Agreement (1900) stabilized retail prices, while circulating libraries and book clubs extended reach into middle-class parlors from Manchester to Glasgow. William Heinemann issued The Man of Property in 1906; the Forsyte sequence then appeared between 1918 and 1933, overlapping with Galsworthy’s plays and essays. International audiences—especially in the United States and continental Europe—read the novels as anthropology of Englishness. Galsworthy died on 31 January 1933 at Hampstead; his ashes were scattered on the South Downs near Kingston, Sussex, and a memorial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, followed. The cycle’s publication rhythm echoed the very incrementalism it anatomized.
Geography underwrites character. London’s West End—Mayfair, St James’s, and Piccadilly—maps clubland and haute commerce; Kensington and Bayswater announce comfortable polish; Bloomsbury hints heterodoxy. South and west along the Thames—Chelsea, Putney, Richmond—extend the gradient from studio to suburban lawn. The imagined modern house at Robin Hill, perched above the river near Richmond, opposes stuccoed tradition with clean lines and open prospect, absorbing late Victorian aesthetic debate about light, space, and sincerity. Beyond the capital, Sussex downs and Surrey lanes offer retreats for conscience and affair alike. Trains, cabs, and footpaths create a choreography where address, commute, and vista become adjuncts to will, decorum, and self-invention.
The Forsyte whole charts Britain’s long passage from high Victorian orthodoxy to interwar uncertainty. The first trilogy (1906; 1918–1921) sets property and marriage against legal modernity; the second (1924–1928) inhabits a media-saturated, litigious commerce; the third (1931–1933) confronts depression-era strain and changing codes of honor. The interludes and On Forsyte ‘Change (1930) braid in backstories of the 1880s–1890s, revealing continuities beneath rupture. From the Boer War through the Armistice, the General Strike of 1926, and sterling’s departure from gold in 1931, public history seasons private calculations. Galsworthy’s plain style and institutional curiosity deliver a composite portrait: family as a legal person, England as a house under continual valuation.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Man of Property (The Forsyte Saga, Book 1)
Introduces the prosperous Forsyte clan at the height of Victorian respectability, focusing on Soames Forsyte's possessive marriage to Irene and the tensions between acquisition, aesthetics, and social pride.
The Forsyte Saga Interludes: 'Indian Summer of a Forsyte' and 'Awakening'
Two bridging pieces that trace old age and first youth—Old Jolyon's late-life calm at Robin Hill and a younger generation's first stirrings of love—casting a reflective light on change within the family.
In Chancery (The Forsyte Saga, Book 2)
Marital estrangement and legal proceedings draw the Forsytes into public view, as individual desires collide with family interest and prevailing social codes.
To Let (The Forsyte Saga, Book 3)
The romance of Fleur Forsyte and Jon Forsyte reopens old wounds, setting the past against the future as the next generation confronts their elders' legacy.
The White Monkey (A Modern Comedy, Book 1)
In the early 1920s, Fleur and Michael Mont navigate modern London's art, money, and media, while the older Forsytes adjust uneasily to a transformed society.
A Modern Comedy Interludes: 'A Silent Wooing' and 'Passers By'
Brief episodes of courtship, rivalry, and social crossing that connect the larger books, highlighting shifting ambitions and the transient bonds of the age.
The Silver Spoon (A Modern Comedy, Book 2)
A social feud escalates into a libel battle with political overtones, challenging the family's resources and exposing the risks of celebrity and reputation.
Swan Song (A Modern Comedy, Book 3)
As the postwar decade closes, aging certainties falter and personal ambitions crest, bringing the Forsyte ethos to a poised, elegiac turning point.
Maid in Waiting (End of the Chapter, Book 1)
Introduces Dinny Cherrell and her extended family, probing questions of honor, livelihood, and attachment as the old order adapts to interwar realities.
Flowering Wilderness (End of the Chapter, Book 2)
Dinny's relationship with a celebrated yet controversial figure tests faith, loyalty, and the limits of social tolerance.
Over the River (One More River) (End of the Chapter, Book 3)
Follows a woman's struggle to free herself from a damaging marriage within the strictures of English law and opinion, drawing Dinny into a fight for justice and dignity.
On Forsyte ‘Change
A cycle of linked stories offering backstories and side-lights on the Forsytes—their trades, courtships, and codes—enriching the larger chronicle.
The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books
The Forsyte Saga
Table of Contents
Book 1: The Man of Property
Table of Contents
TO EDWARD GARNETT
PART I
CHAPTER I—'AT HOME' AT OLD JOLYON'S
Table of Contents
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family—no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy—evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow from its planting—a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and persistent—one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.
On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.
This was the occasion of an 'at home' to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon's granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks, the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the corner of her brother Timothy's green drawing-room, where, under the aegis of a plume of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and knitting, surrounded by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes. Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea.
When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died—but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.
About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests, there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert, inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the face of Soames Forsyte had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.[1q]
The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old Jolyon's 'home' the psychological moment of the family history, made it the prelude of their drama.
The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and—the sniff. Danger—so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual—was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.
Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window, where he could get more than his fair share of fresh air, the other twin, James—the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called these brothers—like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In his hands he turned and turned a piece of china. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of 'sniff,' as though despising an egg which he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to the occasion had affected them all.
Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies—Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who not in first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution. She had survived him for many years. With her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies held fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic feather or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.
In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty years of age, with his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white moustache, which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.
Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James, Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers was very different from the other, yet they, too, were alike.
Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions, marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and permanent to discuss—the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family fortunes.
Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this same stamp—less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable—a sign of something ineradicable in the family soul. At one time or another during the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an expression of distrust, the object of which was undoubtedly the man whose acquaintance they were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was known to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged to such before, and had actually married them. It was not altogether for this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes misgave them. They could not have explained the origin of a misgiving obscured by the mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that he had paid his duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat—a soft grey hat, not even a new one—a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. "So, extraordinary, my dear—so odd," Aunt Hester, passing through the little, dark hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to 'shoo' it off a chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat—Tommy had such disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.
Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which embodies the whole character of a scene, or place, or person, so those unconscious artists—the Forsytes had fastened by intuition on this hat; it was their significant trifle, the detail in which was embedded the meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: "Come, now, should I have paid that visit in that hat?" and each had answered "No!" and some, with more imagination than others, had added: "It would never have come into my head!"
George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been worn as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such. "Very haughty!" he said, "the wild Buccaneer."
And this mot, the 'Buccaneer,' was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.
Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.
"We don't think you ought to let him, dear!" they had said.
June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little embodiment of will she was: "Oh! what does it matter? Phil never knows what he's got on!"
No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know what he had on? No, no! What indeed was this young man, who, in becoming engaged to June, old Jolyon's acknowledged heiress, had done so well for himself? He was an architect, not in itself a sufficient reason for wearing such a hat. None of the Forsytes happened to be architects, but one of them knew two architects who would never have worn such a hat upon a call of ceremony in the London season.
Dangerous—ah, dangerous! June, of course, had not seen this, but, though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs. Soames—who was always so beautifully dressed—that feathers were vulgar? Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so dreadfully downright was dear June!
These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon's invitation. An 'At Home' at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for twelve years, not indeed, since old Mrs. Jolyon had died.
Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously united in spite of all their differences, they had taken arms against a common peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared to run upon and trample the invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected to give; for though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way: 'What are you givin'? Nicholas is givin' spoons!'—so very much depended on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking, it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect them. In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species of family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock Exchange—the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy's commodious, red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester.
The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have been for any family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterize the great upper middle-class, to feel otherwise than uneasy!
The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door; his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though he found what was going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to himself. George, speaking aside to his brother, Eustace, said:
"Looks as if he might make a bolt of it—the dashing Buccaneer!"
This 'very singular-looking man,' as Mrs. Small afterwards called him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown face, a dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and hollow checks. His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his head, and bulged out in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the Lion-house at the Zoo. He had sherry-coloured eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old Jolyon's coachman, after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre, had remarked to the butler:
"I dunno what to make of 'im. Looks to me for all the world like an 'alf-tame leopard." And every now and then a Forsyte would come up, sidle round, and take a look at him.
June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity—a little bit of a thing, as somebody once said, 'all hair and spirit,' with fearless blue eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too slender for her crown of red-gold hair.
A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at these two with a shadowy smile.
Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other, her grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of all men near were fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed to set it moving. There was warmth, but little colour, in her cheeks; her large, dark eyes were soft.
But it was at her lips—asking a question, giving an answer, with that shadowy smile—that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.
The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked her name.
June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.
"Irene is my greatest chum," she said: "Please be good friends, you two!"
At the little lady's command they all three smiled; and while they were smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind the woman with the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:
"Ah! introduce me too!"
He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene's side at public functions, and even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse, could be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange expressions of watchfulness and longing.
At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the piece of china.
"I wonder at Jolyon's allowing this engagement," he said to Aunt Ann. "They tell me there's no chance of their getting married for years. This young Bosinney" (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general usage of a short o) "has got nothing. When Winifred married Dartie, I made him bring every penny into settlement—lucky thing, too—they'd ha' had nothing by this time!"
Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in the family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely spoke, husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of conscience, her look was as good as an answer.
"Well," he said, "I couldn't help Irene's having no money. Soames was in such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on her."
Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes wander to the group by the door.
"It's my opinion," he said unexpectedly, "that it's just as well as it is."
Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance. She knew what he was thinking. If Irene had no money she would not be so foolish as to do anything wrong; for they said—they said—she had been asking for a separate room; but, of course, Soames had not....
James interrupted her reverie:
"But where," he asked, "was Timothy? Hadn't he come with them?"
Through Aunt Ann's compressed lips a tender smile forced its way:
"No, he didn't think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria about; and he so liable to take things."
James answered:
"Well, HE takes good care of himself. I can't afford to take the care of myself that he does."
Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt, was dominant in that remark.
Timothy, indeed, was seldom seen. The baby of the family, a publisher by profession, he had some years before, when business was at full tide, scented out the stagnation which, indeed, had not yet come, but which ultimately, as all agreed, was bound to set in, and, selling his share in a firm engaged mainly in the production of religious books, had invested the quite conspicuous proceeds in three per cent. consols. By this act he had at once assumed an isolated position, no other Forsyte being content with less than four per cent. for his money; and this isolation had slowly and surely undermined a spirit perhaps better than commonly endowed with caution. He had become almost a myth—a kind of incarnation of security haunting the background of the Forsyte universe. He had never committed the imprudence of marrying, or encumbering himself in any way with children.
James resumed, tapping the piece of china:
"This isn't real old Worcester. I s'pose Jolyon's told you something about the young man. From all I can learn, he's got no business, no income, and no connection worth speaking of; but then, I know nothing—nobody tells me anything."
Aunt Ann shook her head. Over her square-chinned, aquiline old face a trembling passed; the spidery fingers of her hands pressed against each other and interlaced, as though she were subtly recharging her will.
The eldest by some years of all the Forsytes, she held a peculiar position amongst them. Opportunists and egotists one and all—though not, indeed, more so than their neighbours—they quailed before her incorruptible figure, and, when opportunities were too strong, what could they do but avoid her!
Twisting his long, thin legs, James went on:
"Jolyon, he will have his own way. He's got no children"—and stopped, recollecting the continued existence of old Jolyon's son, young Jolyon, June's father, who had made such a mess of it, and done for himself by deserting his wife and child and running away with that foreign governess. "Well," he resumed hastily, "if he likes to do these things, I s'pose he can afford to. Now, what's he going to give her? I s'pose he'll give her a thousand a year; he's got nobody else to leave his money to."
He stretched out his hand to meet that of a dapper, clean-shaven man, with hardly a hair on his head, a long, broken nose, full lips, and cold grey eyes under rectangular brows.
"Well, Nick," he muttered, "how are you?"
Nicholas Forsyte, with his bird-like rapidity and the look of a preternaturally sage schoolboy (he had made a large fortune, quite legitimately, out of the companies of which he was a director), placed within that cold palm the tips of his still colder fingers and hastily withdrew them.
"I'm bad," he said, pouting—"been bad all the week; don't sleep at night. The doctor can't tell why. He's a clever fellow, or I shouldn't have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills."
"Doctors!" said James, coming down sharp on his words: "I've had all the doctors in London for one or another of us. There's no satisfaction to be got out of them; they'll tell you anything. There's Swithin, now. What good have they done him? There he is; he's bigger than ever; he's enormous; they can't get his weight down. Look at him!"
Swithin Forsyte, tall, square, and broad, with a chest like a pouter pigeon's in its plumage of bright waistcoats, came strutting towards them.
"Er—how are you?" he said in his dandified way, aspirating the 'h' strongly (this difficult letter was almost absolutely safe in his keeping)—"how are you?"
Each brother wore an air of aggravation as he looked at the other two, knowing by experience that they would try to eclipse his ailments.
"We were just saying," said James, "that you don't get any thinner."
Swithin protruded his pale round eyes with the effort of hearing.
"Thinner? I'm in good case," he said, leaning a little forward, "not one of your thread-papers like you!"
But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly as a distinguished appearance.
Aunt Ann turned her old eyes from one to the other. Indulgent and severe was her look. In turn the three brothers looked at Ann. She was getting shaky. Wonderful woman! Eighty-six if a day; might live another ten years, and had never been strong. Swithin and James, the twins, were only seventy-five, Nicholas a mere baby of seventy or so. All were strong, and the inference was comforting. Of all forms of property their respective healths naturally concerned them most.
"I'm very well in myself," proceeded James, "but my nerves are out of order. The least thing worries me to death. I shall have to go to Bath."
"Bath!" said Nicholas. "I've tried Harrogate. That's no good. What I want is sea air. There's nothing like Yarmouth. Now, when I go there I sleep...."
"My liver's very bad," interrupted Swithin slowly. "Dreadful pain here;" and he placed his hand on his right side.
"Want of exercise," muttered James, his eyes on the china. He quickly added: "I get a pain there, too."
Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his old face.
"Exercise!" he said. "I take plenty: I never use the lift at the Club."
"I didn't know," James hurried out. "I know nothing about anybody; nobody tells me anything...."
Swithin fixed him with a stare:
"What do you do for a pain there?"
James brightened.
"I take a compound...."
"How are you, uncle?"
June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her little height to his great height, and her hand outheld.
The brightness faded from James's visage.
"How are you?" he said, brooding over her. "So you're going to Wales to-morrow to visit your young man's aunts? You'll have a lot of rain there. This isn't real old Worcester." He tapped the bowl. "Now, that set I gave your mother when she married was the genuine thing."
June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old lady's face, she kissed the girl's check with trembling fervour.
"Well, my dear," she said, "and so you're going for a whole month!"
The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure. The old lady's round, steel grey eyes, over which a film like a bird's was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning to say good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each other, were busy again with the recharging of her will against that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.
'Yes,' she thought, 'everybody's been most kind; quite a lot of people come to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.' Amongst the throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper-middle class—there were only some twenty percent of Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes—and certainly there was not much difference—she saw only her own flesh and blood. It was her world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses, engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether they were making money—all this was her property, her delight, her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and persons of no real significance. This it was that she would have to lay down when it came to her turn to die; this which gave to her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which none of us can bear to live; and to this she clung wistfully, with a greed that grew each day! If life were slipping away from her, this she would retain to the end.
She thought of June's father, young Jolyon, who had run away with that foreign girl. And what a sad blow to his father and to them all. Such a promising young fellow! A sad blow, though there had been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo's wife seeking for no divorce! A long time ago! And when June's mother died, six years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children now, so she had heard. Still, he had forfeited his right to be there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young fellow! The thought rankled with the bitterness of a long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart. A little water stood in her eyes. With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she wiped them stealthily.
"Well, Aunt Ann?" said a voice behind.
Soames Forsyte, flat-shouldered, clean-shaven, flat-cheeked, flat-waisted, yet with something round and secret about his whole appearance, looked downwards and aslant at Aunt Ann, as though trying to see through the side of his own nose.
"And what do you think of the engagement?" he asked.
Aunt Ann's eyes rested on him proudly; of all the nephews since young Jolyon's departure from the family nest, he was now her favourite, for she recognised in him a sure trustee of the family soul that must so soon slip beyond her keeping.
"Very nice for the young man," she said; "and he's a good-looking young fellow; but I doubt if he's quite the right lover for dear June."
Soames touched the edge of a gold-lacquered lustre.
"She'll tame him," he said, stealthily wetting his finger and rubbing it on the knobby bulbs. "That's genuine old lacquer; you can't get it nowadays. It'd do well in a sale at Jobson's." He spoke with relish, as though he felt that he was cheering up his old aunt. It was seldom he was so confidential. "I wouldn't mind having it myself," he added; "you can always get your price for old lacquer."
"You're so clever with all those things," said Aunt Ann. "And how is dear Irene?"
Soames's smile died.
"Pretty well," he said. "Complains she can't sleep; she sleeps a great deal better than I do," and he looked at his wife, who was talking to Bosinney by the door.
Aunt Ann sighed.
"Perhaps," she said, "it will be just as well for her not to see so much of June. She's such a decided character, dear June!"
Soames flushed; his flushes passed rapidly over his flat cheeks and centered between his eyes, where they remained, the stamp of disturbing thoughts.
"I don't know what she sees in that little flibbertigibbet," he burst out, but noticing that they were no longer alone, he turned and again began examining the lustre.
"They tell me Jolyon's bought another house," said his father's voice close by; "he must have a lot of money—he must have more money than he knows what to do with! Montpellier Square, they say; close to Soames! They never told me, Irene never tells me anything!"
"Capital position, not two minutes from me," said the voice of Swithin, "and from my rooms I can drive to the Club in eight."
The position of their houses was of vital importance to the Forsytes, nor was this remarkable, since the whole spirit of their success was embodied therein.
Their father, of farming stock, had come from Dorsetshire near the beginning of the century.
'Superior Dosset Forsyte, as he was called by his intimates, had been a stonemason by trade, and risen to the position of a master-builder.
Towards the end of his life he moved to London, where, building on until he died, he was buried at Highgate. He left over thirty thousand pounds between his ten children. Old Jolyon alluded to him, if at all, as 'A hard, thick sort of man; not much refinement about him.' The second generation of Forsytes felt indeed that he was not greatly to their credit. The only aristocratic trait they could find in his character was a habit of drinking Madeira.
Aunt Hester, an authority on family history, described him thus: "I don't recollect that he ever did anything; at least, not in my time. He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your Uncle Swithin's colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very tall" (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); "a fresh-coloured man. I remember he used to drink Madeira; but ask your Aunt Ann. What was his father? He—er—had to do with the land down in Dorsetshire, by the sea."
James once went down to see for himself what sort of place this was that they had come from. He found two old farms, with a cart track rutted into the pink earth, leading down to a mill by the beach; a little grey church with a buttressed outer wall, and a smaller and greyer chapel. The stream which worked the mill came bubbling down in a dozen rivulets, and pigs were hunting round that estuary. A haze hovered over the prospect. Down this hollow, with their feet deep in the mud and their faces towards the sea, it appeared that the primeval Forsytes had been content to walk Sunday after Sunday for hundreds of years.
Whether or no James had cherished hopes of an inheritance, or of something rather distinguished to be found down there, he came back to town in a poor way, and went about with a pathetic attempt at making the best of a bad job.
"There's very little to be had out of that," he said; "regular country little place, old as the hills...."
Its age was felt to be a comfort. Old Jolyon, in whom a desperate honesty welled up at times, would allude to his ancestors as: "Yeomen—I suppose very small beer." Yet he would repeat the word 'yeomen' as if it afforded him consolation.
They had all done so well for themselves, these Forsytes, that they were all what is called 'of a certain position.' They had shares in all sorts of things, not as yet—with the exception of Timothy—in consols, for they had no dread in life like that of 3 per cent. for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable churches of the Metropolis. To have doubted their Christianity would have caused them both pain and surprise. Some of them paid for pews, thus expressing in the most practical form their sympathy with the teachings of Christ.
Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the park, watched like sentinels, lest the fair heart of this London, where their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and leave them lower in their own estimations.
There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the Jameses in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he—the Soamses in their nest off Knightsbridge; the Rogers in Prince's Gardens (Roger was that remarkable Forsyte who had conceived and carried out the notion of bringing up his four sons to a new profession. "Collect house property, nothing like it," he would say; "I never did anything else").
The Haymans again—Mrs. Hayman was the one married Forsyte sister—in a house high up on Campden Hill, shaped like a giraffe, and so tall that it gave the observer a crick in the neck; the Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great bargain; and last, but not least, Timothy's on the Bayswater Road, where Ann, and Juley, and Hester, lived under his protection.
But all this time James was musing, and now he inquired of his host and brother what he had given for that house in Montpellier Square. He himself had had his eye on a house there for the last two years, but they wanted such a price.
Old Jolyon recounted the details of his purchase.
"Twenty-two years to run?" repeated James; "The very house I was after—you've given too much for it!"
Old Jolyon frowned.
"It's not that I want it," said James hastily; "it wouldn't suit my purpose at that price. Soames knows the house, well—he'll tell you it's too dear—his opinion's worth having."
"I don't," said old Jolyon, "care a fig for his opinion."
