The White Monkey

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To render the forms and colours of an epoch is beyond the powers of any novelist, and very far beyond the powers of this novelist; but to try and express a little of its spirit was undoubtedly at the back of his mind in penning this trilogy. Like the Irishman’s chicken, our Present runs about so fast that it cannot be summed up; it can at most be snapshotted while it hurries looking for its Future without notion where, what, or when that Future will be.

The England of 1886, when the Forsyte Saga began, also had no Future, for England then expected its Present to endure, and rode its bicycle in a sort of dream, disturbed only by two bogles—Mr. Gladstone and the Irish Members.

The England of 1926—when the Modern Comedy closes—with one foot in the air and the other in a Morris Oxford, is going round and round like a kitten after its tail, muttering: “If one could only see where one wants to stop!”

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