The Forsyte saga - Complete
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
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 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.
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