The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2

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The Forsyte Saga
Volume 2

John Galsworthy, the son of a solicitor, was born in 1867 and educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1890, but a chance meeting with Joseph Conrad, and the strong influence of his future wife, turned him to writing. A collection of short stories, From the Four Winds (1897), was followed by a novel entitled Jocelyn (1898). The Man of Property appeared in 1906 and, together with In Chancery and To Let, completed the first volume of the Forsyte trilogy, The Forsyte Saga, published in 1922. His playwrighting career began in 1906 with The Silver Box, the first of a long line of plays with social and moral themes. The second Forsyte trilogy, which contained The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon and Swan Song, was published as A Modern Comedy in 1929. In 1931 Galsworthy followed the immense success of the Forsyte books with a further collection of stories, On Forsyte‘Change. The final Forsyte trilogy, containing Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness and Over the River, was published posthumously as The End of the Chapter in 1934. The nine novels in his three Forsyte trilogies are all published by Penguin. A television serial of the Forsyte chronicles, presented by the BBC in 1967, received great critical acclaim in Great Britain and over the world.

The first President of the PEN Club, John Galsworthy was the recipient of several honorary degrees and other literary honours. He was made an OM in 1929 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. He lived on Dartmoor for many years and afterwards at Bury on the Sussex Downs. He died in 1933.

John Galsworthy

THE FORSYTE SAGA

Volume 2

THE WHITE MONKEY

THE SILVER SPOON

SWAN SONG

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Published by the Penguin Group
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The White Monkey first published by William Heinemann Ltd 1924
Published in Penguin Books 1967

The Silver Spoon first published by William Heinemann Ltd 1926
Published in Penguin Books 1967

Swan Song first published by William Heinemann Ltd 1928
Published in Penguin Books 1967

These three books (the fourth, fifth and sixth parts of the nine-
volume Forsyte Chronicles) published together in Penguin
Books under the title A Modern Comedy, The Forsyte Chronicles, Vol. 2 1980
Reprinted under the present title in Penguin Classics 2001
12

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without me publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binging or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90794–9

THE WHITE MONKEY

Contents

Preface

PART ONE

1   Promenade

2   Home

3   Musical

4   Dining

5   Eve

6   ‘Old Forsyte’ and ‘Old Mont’

7   ‘Old Mont’ and ‘Old Forsyte’

8   Bicket

9   Confusion

10 Passing of a Sportsman

11 Venture

12 Figures and Facts

13 Tenterhooks

PART TWO

1   The Mark Falls

2   Victorine

3   Michael Walks and Talks

4   Fleur’s Body

5   Fleur’s Soul

6   Michael Gets ‘What-for’

7   ‘The Altogether’

8   Soames Takes the Matter Up

9   Sleuth

10 Face

11 Cocked Hat

12 Going East

PART THREE

1   Bank Holiday

2   Office Work

3   ‘Afternoon of a Dryad’

4   Afternoon of a Bicket

5   Michael Gives Advice

6   Quittance

7   Looking Into Elderson

8   Levanted

9   Soames Doesn’t Give a Damn

10 But Takes No Chances

11 With a Small ‘n’

12 Ordeal by Shareholder

13 Soames at Bay

14 On the Rack

15 Calm

TO

Max Beerbobm

PREFACE

IN naming this second part of The Forsyte Chronicles ‘A Modern Comedy’ the word comedy is stretched, perhaps, as far as the word Saga was stretched to cover the first part. And yet, what but a comedic view can be taken, what but comedic significance gleaned, of so restive a period as that in which we have lived since the war? An Age which knows not what it wants, yet is intensely preoccupied with getting it, must evoke a smile, if rather a sad one.

To render the forms and colours of an epoch is beyond the powers of any novelist, and very far beyond the powers of this novelist; but to try and express a little of its spirit was undoubtedly at the back of his mind in penning this trilogy. Like the Irishman’s chicken, our Present runs about so fast that it cannot be summed up; it can at most be snapshotted while it hurries looking for its Future without notion where, what, or when that Future will be.

The England of 1886, when the Forsyte Saga began, also had no Future, for England then expected its Present to endure, and rode its bicycle in a sort of dream, disturbed only by two bogles – Mr Gladstone and the Irish Members.

The England of 1926 – when the Modern Comedy closes – with one foot in the air and the other in a Morris Oxford, is going round and round like a kitten after its tail, muttering: ‘If one could only see where one wants to stop!’

Everything being now relative, there is no longer absolute dependence to be placed on God, Free Trade, Marriage, Consols, Coal, or Caste.

Everywhere being now overcrowded, there is no place where anyone can stay for long, except the mere depopulated countryside, admittedly too dull, and certainly too unprofitable to dwell in.

Everyone, having been in an earthquake which lasted four years, has lost the habit of standing still.

And yet, the English character has changed very little, if at all. The General Strike of 1926, with which the last part of this trilogy begins, supplied proof of that. We are still a people that cannot be rushed, distrustful of extremes, saved by the grace of our defensive humour, well-tempered, resentful of interference, improvident and wasteful, but endowed with a certain genius for recovery. If we believe in nothing much else, we still be lieve in ourselves. That salient characteristic of the English will bear thinking about Why, for instance, do we continually run ourselves down? Simply because we have not got the inferiority complex and are indifferent to what other people think of us. No people in the world seems openly less sure of itself; no people is secretly more sure. Incidentally, it might be worth the while of those who own certain public mouths inclined to blow the British trumpet to remember, that the blowing of one’s own trumpet is the insidious beginning of the inferiority complex. Only those strong enough to keep silent about self are strong enough to be sure of self. The epoch we are passing through is one which favours misjudgement of the English character, and of the position of England. There never was a country where real deterioration of human fibre had less chance than in this island, because there is no other country whose climate is so changeable, so tempering to character, so formative of grit, and so basically healthy. What follows in this preface should be read in the light of that remark.

In the present epoch, no Early Victorianism survives. By Early Victorianism is meant that of the old Forsytes, already on the wane in 1886; what has survived, and potently, is the Victorianism of Soames and his generation, more self-conscious, but not sufficiently self-conscious to be either self-destructive or self-forgetful. It is against the background of this more or less fixed quantity that we can best see the shape and colour of the present intensely self-conscious and all-questioning generation. The old Forsytes – Old Jolyon, Swithin and James, Roger, Nicholas and Timothy – lived their lives without ever asking whether life was worth living. They found it interesting, very absorbing from day to day, and even if they had no very intimate belief in a future life, they had very great faith in the progress of their own positions, and in laying up treasure for their children.