Man of Property | Page 2

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.
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.

THE MAN OF PROPERTY
by JOHN GALSWORTHY

"........ You will answer The slaves are ours ....." -Merchant of Venice.

TO EDWARD GARNETT

CHAPTER I
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PART I

CHAPTER I
'AT HOME' AT OLD JOLYON'S
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