[Dupré is an English novelist and biographer. In the following excerpt, she investigates the satirical nature of the short stories in The Man of Devon.]

[It is in his] collection of stories, published under the title The Man of Devon in September 1901, that Galsworthy claims to have really found the satirical vein within himself. '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' [Preface to the Manaton edition, Vol. IV].

Galsworthy's friend and biographer, R. H. Mottram, sees this story, 'The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte', as the real turning point in its author's career, and one of the most biographically significant that he ever wrote. I doubt if many modern readers would share this view; they would perhaps see Swithin Forsyte's greatest merit in his refusal to die, in his insistence on remaining instead lurking somewhere in his creator's mind, a fantasy of the future, a premonition of the great genealogy of Forsytes that was to come.

The Swithin Forsyte of the short story does die, but as he lies on his death bed his mind wanders into the past and relives an incident that is utterly uncharacteristic of him, or anything else in his life. At that moment, had he not run away from the experience, the whole course of his life would have been different from what it was, he himself would have become a different person. As a young man travelling in Salzburg, he comes across a strange group of Hungarian exiles in a bierhalle, becomes involved in their quarrels, and falls passionately in love with the daughter of one of them, a young girl called Rozsi. He is tempted to marry her, but convention and prudence deter him. 'They meant him to marry her! And the horrid idea was strengthened by his own middle-class reverence for marriage . . . he was afraid of the other way—too primitive.' 'He set to thinking what such a marriage meant. In the first place it meant ridicule, in the second place ridicule, in the third place ridicule. She would eat chicken bones with her fingers . . .'

The choice is all too clear, to take this beautiful vision, to make it his own, this chance that has come to him, that will redeem his life from its dreary course, or to flee from it. He chooses the latter. But as he dies he is revisited by the ghost of Rozsi, who reproaches him for his cowardice.

'I could show you things,' she says.

'Where are you?' gasped Swithin; 'What's the matter? I'm lost.' . . . Suddenly aloud in his sleep, Swithin muttered, 'I've missed something.'

Again fingers touched his brow; again Rozsi's eyes were looking at him from the wall. 'What is it?' he asked, 'Can't I get out of here and come with you? I'm choking.' 'What is it,' he thought; 'what have I lost?' And slowly his mind began to travel over his investments . . . What is it? Things he had never seen, was never meant to see—sacrifice, chivalry, love, fidelity, beauty and strange adventure—things remote, that you couldn't see with your eyes—had they come to haunt him?

Galsworthy later revised this story and cut out most of Swithin's final dream, to the great loss of the story. When it was reissued in 1909 with The Villa Rubein, a very different version appeared entitled now 'Salvation of a Forsyte'.

It is an allegorical tale, though the characters bear no sort of resemblance to Ada and John. Yet Ada was John's Rozsi; she was the chance which fortune sent him, the chance to break away from convention and to make this vision of beauty and all that it brought with it his own—in his case the world of imagination and writing. But both Swithin and John made the mistake of assuming that life contains only one such moment, failing to see that the gift of living lies in the ability to remain ever open and receptive to all the experiences that may come.

This story is perhaps the first example of what Galsworthy came to refer to as his 'negative method' of writing: in telling the story of Swithin Forsyte and his terrible deathbed realization that his life, now so nearly over, has in fact never been lived, Galsworthy is telling us the opposite of his own story. He did take his chance, his Ada, and from the struggles of Jocelyn we know that there were moments when, like Swithin, he had felt like jumping into his carriage and 'Flying back along the road faster than he had come, with pale face and eyes blank'.

Conrad had much to do with the publication of The Man of Devon. 'I've written to Blackwood,' he wrote, 'mainly for the purpose of insinuating amongst other matters that a quick decision as to your story would be welcome.' His negotiations were successful and the book was published by Blackwood in September 1901. Upon its publication Conrad wrote a most interesting letter to Galsworthy; the letter is dated 11 November 1901.

There is a certain caution of touch which will militate against popularity. After all, to please the public (if one isn't a sugary imbecile or an inflated fraud) one must handle one's subject intimately. Mere intimacy with the subject won't do. And conviction is found (for others, not for the author) only in certain contradictions and irrelevancies to the general conception of character (or characters) and of the subject. Say what you like the man lives in his eccentricities (so called) alone. They give a vigour to his personality which mere consistency can never do. One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the few particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance. And before all one must divest oneself of every particle of respect for one's characters. You are really most profound and attain the greatest art in handling the people you do not respect. For instance the minor character in V.R. And in this volume I am bound to recognize that Forysthe [sic] is the best. I recognize this with a certain reluctance because indubitably there is more beauty (and more felicity of style too) in the M of D.

Written at this early date this piece of criticism is astonishingly perceptive. Conrad points to a danger that is already apparent in Galsworthy's writing, that of shying away from what was most personal, 'a certain caution of touch'. Where Conrad was wrong, of course, was in suggesting that this element in his friend's writing would militate against popularity. Galsworthy was to know a success in his lifetime that none of his English contemporaries were to approach, though after his death it was this very impersonality that was to doom his work for many years to almost complete obscurity.

It is interesting, too, that Conrad should have praised his handling of the 'people you do not respect' ; the negative method was already beginning to work, making a convincing case for Swithin, as it was, to a far greater extent, to make for Soames a few years later.

As Conrad says, 'The Man of Devon', the title story of the book, is a far more beautiful and poetic piece of writing than 'The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte'; it is a strange, almost whimsical story written in the first person as a series of letters. The heroine, Pasiance, is an extraordinary character; she has a wild savageness that is reminiscent of Emily Brontë's Cathy Earnshaw. Like Cathy, she is a child of her particular countryside; she knows nothing of the life of the town or the civilized world. In fact in this story Galsworthy sees his beloved Devon rather as the Brontës saw Yorkshire, or Hardy, Dorset; the countryside becomes another character in the story, a force that determines the lives of the people who live in it. Thus it contains within itself elements of tragedy that may ultimately destroy its own, as in the end it does Pasiance, who throws herself over the cliff because she believes her lover, Zachary Pearse, has deserted her:

Fancy took me to the cliff where she had fallen. I found the point of rock where the cascade of ivy flows down the cliff; the ledge on which she had climbed was a little to my right—a mad place. It showed plainly what wild emotions must have been driving her! Behind was a half-cut cornfield with a fringe of poppies, and swarms of harvest insects creeping and flying; in the uncut corn a landrail kept up a continual charring. The sky was blue to the very horizon, and the sea wonderful, under that black wild cliff stained here and there with red. There are no brassy, east-coast skies here; but always sleepy, soft-shaped clouds, full of subtle stir and change. Passages of Zachary Pearse's letter kept rising to my lips. After all he's the man that his native place, and life, and blood have made him.

With the possible exception of the story 'The Apple Tree' and a few very minor pieces, 'The Man of Devon' is unlike anything else that Galsworthy wrote; there is no element of satire here, no wish to reform or criticize; it is a tale of simple but passionate people set in the Devonshire countryside. Galsworthy is experimenting at this stage, seeking out his true métier, and it is interesting that two stories as different as 'The Man of Devon' and 'The Salvation of Swithin Forsyte' should appear in the same volume. But having found the satirist in himself, he is not easily going to reject his new weapon. Pasiance is the more beautiful character, but Swithin is the more powerful; the choice is made and Swithin Forsyte, in more than name, is to be the first child of Galsworthy's pen.