_"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 us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the
old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and
as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin,
Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never
were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming
to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct
was even then the prime force, and that "family" and the sense of home
and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts
to "talk them out."

So many people have written and claimed that their families were the
originals of the Forsytes that one has been almost encouraged to believe
in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners change and modes
evolve, and "Timothy's on the Bayswater Road" becomes a nest of the
unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look upon its like
again, nor perhaps on such a one as James or Old Jolyon. And yet the
figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judges reassure us
daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild
raiders, Beauty and Passion, come stealing in, filching security from
beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will
the essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against the