Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of sandwich, in which the author’s mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.  One’s demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just that, for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope.  It once fell to my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to prove that the artist’s sole function was the impersonal elucidation of the truths of nature.  I was regretfully compelled to observe that there were no such things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the individual vision of the artist.  Seer and thing seen, inextricably involved one with the other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I, at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression of temperament.  I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov—­those masters of such 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.