So many people have written and claimed that their families were the originals of the Forsytes that one has been almostencouraged to believe in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners change and modes evolve, and “Timothy’s on theBayswater Road” becomes a nest of the unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look upon its like again, norperhaps on such a one as James or Old Jolyon. And yet the figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judgesreassure us daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild raiders, Beauty and Passion, comestealing in, filching security from beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will the essentialSoames 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 ofthose tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfectnovelty.

But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much ofa 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 thecase of England was better in 1913 than it was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at Old Jolyon’s to celebrate theengagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with MichaelMont, the state of England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties it was too congealed and low-percented.