All of which is making a very personal issue of _The Dark Flower_; but it's the kind of book you've got to be personal about; you revise your list of friends on a basis of their attitude toward Galsworthy. After I'd finished _The Dark Flower_--and it had never occurred to my naïve mind that anyone would disagree with me about it--various persons began to tell me how wrong I was. Mark Lennan was a cad and a weakling--decidedly the kind of person to be kept out of a good novel. The very beauty of the book made it insidious, someone said; such art expended in defense of immorality would soon tend to confuse our standards. Someone else remarked patronizingly: "Oh, _The Dark Flower_ may be well done and all that, but personally I've always had a passion for the normal!" But, most maddening of all, I think, were those readers of thrillers, of sweet, sentimental stories--those persons who patronize comic opera exclusively because they "see enough tragedy in life to avoid it in the theater"--who asked earnestly: "But, after all, what's the use of such books? What possible _good do they do_?" On another page of this review such questions are answered with a poignancy I dare not compete with. I want to try, instead, to tell why _The Dark Flower_ seems to me an altogether extraordinary piece of work. In the first place, constructively. The story covers three episodes of a man's love life: Spring, with its awakening; Summer, with its deep passion; and Autumn, with its desperate longing for another Spring. But the handling of the episodes is so unepisodic that you feel you've been given the man's whole life, day by day, from Oxford to that final going down the years--_sans_ youth, _sans_ spring, _sans_ beauty, _sans_ passion; _sans_ everything save that "faint, glimmering light--far out there beyond...." This effect of completeness is achieved, I think, by the remarkable intensity of the writing, by the clever (and by no means easy) method of sometimes allowing the characters the author's prerogative of addressing the audience directly. Highly subjective in everything that he does, Galsworthy has reached a climax of subjectivity here: _The Dark Flower_ is as personal in its medium as music.