d 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 not "a beloved,"
he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just
as in "The Pigeon" he describes his meeting with Wellwyn. Though drawn
very much from life, he did not in the end turn o