A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the complaint that Irene and Jolyon those rebels againstproperty — claim spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale is told. No father andmother could have let the boy marry Fleur without knowledge of the facts; and the facts determine Jon, not the persuasion ofhis parents. Moreover, Jolyon’s persuasion is not on his own account, but on Irene’s, and Irene’s persuasion becomes areiterated: “Don’t think of me, think of yourself!” That Jon, knowing the facts, can realise his mother’s feelings, willhardly 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 theForsyte Saga, it cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class. As the old Egyptians placed aroundtheir mummies the necessaries of a future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the, figures of Aunts Ann and Juleyand Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon and James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a littlelife 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, itlies 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.

“........ You will answer The slaves are ours .....”

— Merchant of Venice.

TO EDWARD GARNETT

Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:33:25 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.

The Man of Property, by John Galsworthy

Part IChapter 1