• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

PREFACE
Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a moment of
heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our talks of longpast
days, over the purposes and methods of our art. And my friend, wiser than
I, as he has always been, replied with this doubting phrase "Could we
recapture the zest of that old time?"
I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art has
diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for glimpses of truth
and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes; or that we can no
longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a
lifetime of endeavour h...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

Light, entering the vast room—a room so high that its carved ceiling refused
itself to exact scrutiny—travelled, with the wistful, cold curiosity of the dawn,
over a fantastic storehouse of Time. Light, unaccompanied by the prejudice of
human eyes, made strange revelation of incongruities, as though illuminating
the dispassionate march of history.
For in this dining hall—one of the finest in England—the Caradoc family had
for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their existence. Round
about this dining hall they had built and pulled down and restored, until the
rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect of homogeneity. Here alone
they had left virgin the work of the ...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

Each man born into the world is born like Shelton in this book—to go a journey, and for the most part he is born on the high road. At first he sits there in the dust, with his little chubby hands reaching at nothing, and his little solemn eyes staring into space. As soon as he can toddle, he moves, by the queer instinct we call the love of life, straight along this road, looking neither to the right nor left, so pleased is he to walk. And he is charmed with everything—with the nice flat road, all broad and white, with his own feet, and with the prospect he can see on either hand.

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

One early April afternoon, in a Worcestershire field, the only field in that immediate landscape which was not down in grass, a man moved slowly athwart the furrows, sowing—a big man of heavy build, swinging his hairy brown arm with the grace of strength. He wore no coat or hat; a waistcoat, open over a blue-checked cotton shirt, flapped against belted corduroys that were somewhat the color of his square, pale-brown face and dusty hair. His eyes were sad, with the swimming yet fixed stare of epileptics; his mouth heavy-lipped, so that, but for the yearning eyes, the face would have been almost brutal. He looked as if he suffered from silence.

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

AWAKENING
Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the July
sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway turned; and in that
radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-linen-suited. His hair was shining,
and his eyes, from beneath a frown, for he was considering how to go
downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before the car brought his father
and mother home. Four at a time, and five at the bottom? Stale! Down the
banisters? But in which fashion? On his face, feet foremost? Very stale. On his
stomach, sideways? Paltry! On his back, with his arms stretched down on both
sides? Forbidden! Or on his face, head foremost, in a manner unk...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

NDIAN SUMMER OF A FORSYTE
I
In the last day of May in the early 'nineties, about six o'clock of the evening,
old Jolyon Forsyte sat under the oak tree below the terrace of his house at
Robin Hill. He was waiting for the midges to bite him, before abandoning the
glory of the afternoon. His thin brown hand, where blue veins stood out, held
the end of a cigar in its tapering, long-nailed fingers—a pointed polished nail
had survived with him from those earlier Victorian days when to touch
nothing, even with the tips of the fingers, had been so distinguished. His
domed forehead, great white moustache, lean cheeks, and long lean jaw were
covered from the westering sunshine by an old b...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

THE FORSYTE SAGA
PREFACE:
"The Forsyte Saga" was the title originally destined for that part of it which is
called "The Man of Property"; and to adopt it for the collected chronicles of
the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytean tenacity that is in all of us. The
word Saga might be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic and
that there is little heroism in these pages. But it is used with a suitable irony;
and, after all, this long tale, though it may deal with folk in frock coats,
furbelows, and a gilt-edged period, is not devoid of the essential heat of
conflict. Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days,
as they have come down to ...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

He walked along Holywell that afternoon of early June with his short gown drooping down his arms, and no cap on his thick dark hair. A youth of middle height, and built as if he had come of two very different strains, one sturdy, the other wiry and light. His face, too, was a curious blend, for, though it was strongly formed, its expression was rather soft and moody. His eyes—dark grey, with a good deal of light in them, and very black lashes—had a way of looking beyond what they saw, so that he did not seem always to be quite present; but his smile was exceedingly swift, uncovering teeth as white as a negro's, and giving his face a peculiar eagerness.

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

The year was 1891, the month October, the day Monday. In the dark outside the railway-station at Worsted Skeynes Mr. Horace Pendyce's omnibus, his brougham, his luggage-cart, monopolised space. The face of Mr. Horace Pendyce's coachman monopolised the light of the solitary station lantern. Rosy-gilled, with fat close-clipped grey whiskers and inscrutably pursed lips, it presided high up in the easterly air like an emblem of the feudal system. On the platform within, Mr. Horace Pendyce's first footman and second groom in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top-hats, awaited the arrival of the 6.15.

• English
• Essay
• 11/09/14

Under a burning blue sky, among the pine-trees and junipers, the cypresses and olives of that Odyssean coast, we came one afternoon on a pink house bearing the legend: "Osteria di Tranquillita,"; and, partly because of the name, and partly because we did not expect to find a house at all in those goat-haunted groves above the waves, we tarried for contemplation. To the familiar simplicity of that Italian building there were not lacking signs of a certain spiritual change, for out of the olive-grove which grew to its very doors a skittle-alley had been formed, and two baby cypress-trees were cut into the effigies of a cock and hen.

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

In the year —— there dwelt on Hampstead Heath a small thin gentleman of fifty-eight, gentle disposition, and independent means, whose wits had become somewhat addled from reading the writings and speeches of public men. The castle which, like every Englishman, he inhabited was embedded in lilac bushes and laburnums, and was attached to another castle, embedded, in deference to our national dislike of uniformity, in acacias and laurustinus. Our gentleman, whose name was John Lavender, had until the days of the Great War passed one of those curious existences are sometimes to be met with, in doing harm to nobody.

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

Her predilection for things French came from childish recollections of school-days in Paris, and a hasty removal thence by her father during the revolution of '48, of later travels as a little maiden, by diligence, to Pau and the then undiscovered Pyrenees, to a Montpellier and a Nice as yet unspoiled. Unto her seventy-eighth year, her French accent had remained unruffled, her soul in love with French gloves and dresses; and her face had the pale, unwrinkled, slightly aquiline perfection of the 'French marquise' type—it may, perhaps, be doubted whether any French marquise ever looked the part so perfectly.

• English
• Essay
• 11/09/14

STUDIES AND ESSAYS
QUALITY
I knew him from the days of my extreme youth, because he made my father's
boots; inhabiting with his elder brother two little shops let into one, in a small
by-street-now no more, but then most fashionably placed in the West End.
That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; there was no sign upon its face
that he made for any of the Royal Family—merely his own German name of
Gessler Brothers; and in the window a few pairs of boots. I remember that it
always troubled me to account for those unvarying boots in the window, for he
made only what was ordered, reaching nothing down, and it seemed so
inconceivable that what he made could ever have failed to...

• English
• Essay
• 11/09/14

Once upon a time the Prince of Felicitas had occasion to set forth on a journey. It was a late autumn evening with few pale stars and a moon no larger than the paring of a finger-nail. And as he rode through the purlieus of his city, the white mane of his amber-coloured steed was all that he could clearly see in the dusk of the high streets. His way led through a quarter but little known to him, and he was surprised to find that his horse, instead of ambling forward with his customary gentle vigour, stepped carefully from side to side, stopping now and then to curve his neck and prick his ears—as though at some thing of fear unseen in the darkness; while on either hand creatures could be ...

• English
• Novel
• 11/09/14

Such a day made glad the heart. All the flags of July were waving; the sun and the poppies flaming; white butterflies spiring up and twining, and the bees busy on the snapdragons. The lime-trees were coming into flower. Tall white lilies in the garden beds already rivaled the delphiniums; the York and Lancaster roses were full-blown round their golden hearts. There was a gentle breeze, and a swish and stir and hum rose and fell above the head of Edward Pierson, coming back from his lonely ramble over Tintern Abbey. He had arrived at Kestrel, his brother Robert's home on the bank of the Wye only that morning, having stayed at Bath on the way down; and now he had got his face burnt in that ...