Then came Young Jolyon and Soames and their contemporaries, who, although they had imbibed, with Darwinism and the ’Varsities, definite doubts about a future life, and sufficient introspection to wonder whether they themselves were progressing, retained their sense of property and their desire to provide for, and to live on in their progeny. The generation which came in when Queen Victoria went out, through new ideas about the treatment of children, because of new modes of locomotion, and owing to the Great War, has decided that everything requires re-valuation. And, since there is, seemingly, very little future before property, and less before life, is determined to live now or never, without bothering about the fate of such offspring as it may chance to have. Not that the present generation is less fond of its children than were past generations – human nature does not change on points so elementary – but when everything is keyed to such a pitch of uncertainty, to secure the future at the expense of the present no longer seems worth while.
This is really the fundamental difference between the present and the past generations. People will not provide against that which they cannot see ahead.
All this, of course, refers only to that tenth or so of the population whose eyes are above the property line; below that line there are no Forsytes, and therefore no need for this preface to dip. What average Englishman, moreover, with less than three hundred a year ever took thought for the future, even in Early Victorian days?
This Modern Comedy, then, is staged against a background of that more or less fixed quantity, Soames, and his co-father-in-law, light weight and ninth baronet, Sir Lawrence Mont, with such subsidiary neo-Victorians as the self-righteous Mr Danby, Elderson, Mr Blythe, Sir James Foskisson, Wilfred Bentworth, and Hilary Charwell. Pooling their idiosyncrasies, qualities, and mental attitudes, one gets a fairly comprehensive and steady past against which to limn the features of the present – Fleur and Michael, Wilfrid Desert, Aubrey Greene, Marjorie Ferrar, Norah Curfew, Jon, the Rafaelite, and other minor characters. The multiple types and activities of today – even above the Plimsoll line of property – would escape the confines of twenty novels, so that this Modern Comedy is bound to be a gross understatement of the present generation, but not perhaps a libel on it. Symbolism is boring, so let us hope that a certain, resemblance between the case of Fleur and that of her generation chasing the serenity of which it has been defrauded may escape notice. The fact remains that for the moment, at least, youth is balancing, twirling on the tiptoes of uncertainty. What is to come? Will contentment yet be caught? How will it all settle down? Will things ever again settle down – who knows? Are there to come fresh wars, and fresh inventions hot-foot on those not yet mastered and digested? Or will Fate decree another pause, like that of Victorian times, during which revaluated life will crystallize, and give property and its brood of definite beliefs a further innings?
But, however much or little ‘A Modern Comedy’ may be deemed to reflect the spirit of an Age, it continues in the main to relate the tale of life which sprang from the meeting of Soames and Irene in a Bournemouth drawing-room in 1881, a tale which could but end when its spine snapped, and Soames ‘took the ferry’ forty-five years later.
The chronicler, catechized (as he often is) concerning Soames, knows not precisely what he stands for. Taking him for all in all he was honest, anyway. He lived and moved and had his peculiar being, and now he sleeps. His creator may be pardoned for thinking there was something fitting about his end, for, however far we have travelled from Greek culture and philosophy, there is still truth in the old Greek proverb: ‘That which a man most loves shall in the end destroy him.’
JOHN GALSWORTHY
‘No retreat, no retreat
They must conquer or die
Who have no retreat!’
Mr Gay
PART ONE
Chapter One
PROMENADE
COMING down the steps of ‘Snooks’ Club, so nicknamed by George Forsyte in the late eighties, on that momentous mid-October afternoon of 1922, Sir Lawrence Mont, ninth baronet, set his fine nose towards the east wind, and moved his thin legs with speed. Political by birth rather than by nature, he reviewed the revolution which had restored his Party to power with a detachment not devoid of humour. Passing the Remove Club, he thought: ‘Some sweating into shoes, there! No more confectioned dishes. A woodcock – without trimmings, for a change!’
The captains and the kings had departed from ‘Snooks’ before he entered it, for he was not of ‘that catch-penny crew, now paid off, no sir; fellows who turned their tails on the land the moment the war was over. Pah!’ But for an hour he had listened to echoes, and his lively twisting mind, embedded in deposits of the past, sceptical of the present and of all political protestations and pronouncements, had recorded with amusement the confusion of patriotism and personalities left behind by the fateful gathering. Like most landowners, he distrusted doctrine. If he had a political belief, it was a tax on wheat; and so far as he could see, he was now alone in it – but then he was not seeking election; in other words, his principle was not in danger of extinction from the votes of those who had to pay for bread. Principles – he mused – au fond were pocket; and he wished the deuce people wouldn’t pretend they weren’t! Pocket, in the deep sense of that word, of course, self-interest as member of a definite community. And how the devil was this definite community, the English nation, to exist, when all its land was going out of cultivation, and all its ships and docks in danger of destruction by aeroplanes? He had listened that hour past for a single mention of the land. Not one! It was not practical politics! Confound the fellows! They had to wear their breeches out – keeping seats or getting them. No connexion between posteriors and posterity! No, by George! Thus reminded of posterity, it occurred to him rather suddenly that his son’s wife showed no signs as yet. Two years! Time they were thinking about children. It was dangerous to get into the habit of not having them, when a title and estate depended. A smile twisted his lips and eyebrows which resembled spinneys of dark pothooks. A pretty young creature, most taking; and knew it, too! Whom was she not getting to know? Lions and tigers, monkeys and cats – her house was becoming quite a menagerie of more or less celebrities. There was a certain unreality about that sort of thing! And opposite a British lion in Trafalgar Square Sir Lawrence thought: ‘She’ll be getting these to her house next! She’s got the collecting habit. Michael must look out – in a collector’s house there’s always a lumber-room for old junk, and husbands are liable to get into it.
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