Read The Forsyte Saga Online

Authors: John Galsworthy

The Forsyte Saga

BOOK: The Forsyte Saga
2.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
THE FORSYTE SAGA
John Galsworthy

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Book I—The Man of Property

Dedication

Part I

Chapter I—“At Home” at Old Jolyon's

Chapter II—Old Jolyon Goes to the Opera

Chapter III—Dinner at Swithin's

Chapter IV—Projection of the House

Chapter V—A Forsyte Ménage

Chapter VI—James at Large

Chapter VII—Old Jolyon's Peccadillo

Chapter VIII—Plans of the House

Chapter IX—Death of Aunt Ann

Part II

Chapter I—Progress of the House

Chapter II—June's Treat

Chapter III—Drive with Swithin

Chapter IV—James Goes to See for Himself

Chapter V—Soames and Bosinney Correspond

Chapter VI—Old Jolyon at the Zoo

Chapter VII—Afternoon at Timothy's

Chapter VIII—Dance at Roger's

Chapter IX—Evening at Richmond

Chapter X—Diagnosis of a Forsyte

Chapter XI—Bosinney on Parole

Chapter XII—June Pays Some Calls

Chapter XIII—Perfection of the House

Chapter XIV—Soames Sits on the Stairs

Part III

Chapter I—Mrs. MacAnder's Evidence

Chapter II—Night in the Park

Chapter III—Meeting at the Botanical

Chapter IV—Voyage into the Inferno

Chapter V—The Trial

Chapter VI—Soames Breaks the News

Chapter VII—June's Victory

Chapter VIII—Bosinney's Departure

Chapter IX—Irene's Return

Interlude—Indian Summer of a Forsyte

Dedication

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Book II—In Chancery

Dedication

Part I

Chapter I—At Timothy's

Chapter II—Exit a Man of the World

Chapter III—Soames Prepares to Take Steps

Chapter IV—Soho

Chapter V—James Sees Visions

Chapter VI—No-Longer-Young Jolyon at Home

Chapter VII—The Colt and the Filly

Chapter VIII—Jolyon Prosecutes Trusteeship

Chapter IX—Val Hears the News

Chapter X—Soames Entertains the Future

Chapter XI—And Visits the Past

Chapter XII—On Forsyte 'Change

Chapter XIII—Jolyon Finds Out Where He Is

Chapter XIV—Soames Discovers What He Wants

Part II

Chapter I—The Third Generation

Chapter II—Soames Puts It to the Touch

Chapter III—Visit to Irene

Chapter IV—Where Forsytes Fear to Tread

Chapter V—Jolly Sits in Judgment

Chapter VI—Jolyon in Two Minds

Chapter VII—Dartie versus Dartie

Chapter VIII—The Challenge

Chapter IX—Dinner at James's

Chapter X—Death of the Dog Balthasar

Chapter XI—Timothy Stays the Rot

Chapter XII—Progress of the Chase

Chapter XIII—“Here We Are Again!”

Chapter XIV—Outlandish Night

Part III

Chapter I—Soames in Paris

Chapter II—In the Web

Chapter III—Richmond Park

Chapter IV—Over the River

Chapter V—Soames Acts

Chapter VI—A Summer Day

Chapter VII—A Summer Night

Chapter VIII—James in Waiting

Chapter IX—Out of the Web

Chapter X—Passing of an Age

Chapter XI—Suspended Animation

Chapter XII—Birth of a Forsyte

Chapter XIII—James Is Told

Chapter XIV—His

Interlude—Awakening

Book III—To Let

Dedication

Part I

Chapter I—Encounter

Chapter II—Fine Fleur Forsyte

Chapter III—At Robin Hill

Chapter IV—The Mausoleum

Chapter V—The Native Heath

Chapter VI—Jon

Chapter VII—Fleur

Chapter VIII—Idyll on Grass

Chapter IX—Goya

Chapter X—Trio

Chapter XI—Duet

Chapter XII—Caprice

Part II

Chapter I—Mother and Son

Chapter II—Fathers and Daughters

Chapter III—Meetings

Chapter IV—In Green Street

Chapter V—Purely Forsyte Affairs

Chapter VI—Soames's Private Life

Chapter VII—June Takes a Hand

Chapter VIII—The Bit Between the Teeth

Chapter IX—The Fat in the Fire

Chapter X—Decision

Chapter XI—Timothy Prophesies

Part III

Chapter I—Old Jolyon Walks

Chapter II—Confession

Chapter III—Irene

Chapter IV—Soames Cogitates

Chapter V—The Fixed Idea

Chapter VI—Desperate

Chapter VII—Embassy

Chapter VIII—The Dark Tune

Chapter IX—Under the Oak Tree

Chapter X—Fleur's Wedding

Chapter XI—The Last of the Old Forsytes

About the Author

About the Series

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

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.

Preface

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 realistic—knowing 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 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.

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

BOOK: The Forsyte Saga
2.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Judas Flowering by Jane Aiken Hodge
Into My Arms by Kylie Ladd
Never Have I Ever by Alisha Rai
LEGACY LOST by Rachel Eastwood
Catching Serenity by JoAnn Durgin
Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy
Sweet Silken Bondage by Bobbi Smith
A Most Inconvenient Wish by Eileen Richards
The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages