outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured
by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos
of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism,
holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of
Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.

Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve that
union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself a
little in this volume--binding up the scanty harvests of 1899, 1900, and
1901--especially in the tales: "A Knight," and "Salvation of a Forsyte."
Men, women, trees, and works of fiction--very tiny are the seeds from
which they spring. I used really to see the "Knight"--in 1896, was
it?--sitting in the "Place" in front of the Casino at Monte Carlo; and
because his dried-up elegance, his burnt straw hat, quiet courtesy of
attitude, and big dog, used to fascinate and intrigue me, I began to
imagine his life so as to answer my own questions and to satisfy, I
suppose, the mood I was in. I never spoke to him, I never saw him again.
His real story, no doubt, was as different from that which I wove around
his figure as night from day.

As for Swithin, wild horses will not drag from me confession of where
and when I first saw the prototype which became enlarged to his bulky
stature. I owe Swithin much, for he first released the satirist in me,
and is, moreover, the only one of my characters whom I killed before I
gave him life, for it is in "The Man of Property" that Swithin Forsyte
more memorably lives.

Ranging beyond this volume, I cannot recollect writing the first words