Aristocracy (Social class) -- Fiction; Upper class -- England -- Fiction
THE PATRICIAN
By John Galsworthy
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
PART II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
PART I
CHAPTER I
Light, entering the vast room—a room so high that its carved ceiling
refused itself to exact scrutiny—travelled, with the wistful, cold
curiosity of the dawn, over a fantastic storehouse of Time. Light,
unaccompanied by the prejudice of human eyes, made strange revelation
of incongruities, as though illuminating the dispassionate march of
history.
For in this dining hall—one of the finest in England—the Caradoc family
had for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their existence.
Round about this dining hall they had built and pulled down and
restored, until the rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect
of homogeneity. Here alone they had left virgin the work of the old
quasi-monastic builders, and within it unconsciously deposited their
souls. For there were here, meeting the eyes of light, all those rather
touching evidences of man's desire to persist for ever, those shells of
his former bodies, the fetishes and queer proofs of his faiths, together
with the remorseless demonstration of their treatment at the hands of
Time.
The annalist might here have found all his needed confirmations; the
analyst from this material formed the due equation of high birth; the
philosopher traced the course of aristocracy, from its primeval rise in
crude strength or subtlety, through centuries of power, to picturesque
decadence, and the beginnings of its last stand. Even the artist might
here, perchance, have seized on the dry ineffable pervading spirit, as
one visiting an old cathedral seems to scent out the constriction of its
heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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