The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic
blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to
mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.
But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing
pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and
might, after all, be a much worse animal.
Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and
'fall-of' is in some sort pictured in "The Forsyte Saga," we see now
that we have but jumped out of a frying-pan into a fire. It would be
difficult to substantiate a claim that the case of England was better in
1913 than it was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at Old Jolyon's to
celebrate the engagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when
again the clan gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael
Mont, the state of England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in
the eighties it was too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles
had been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt
probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motor-car, and
flying-machine; the arrival of a cheap Press; the decline of country
life and increase of the towns; the birth of the Cinema.
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