uch
different methods entirely devoid of didacticism--but their work leaves
on me a strangely potent sense of personality. Such subtle intermingling
of seer with thing seen is the 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 of
"The Island Pharisees"--but it would be about August, 1901. Like all the
stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case
it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who died
in some "sacred institution" many years ago of a consumption brought on
by the conditions of his wandering life. If n