In the second place--the great matter of style. Every page shows the very poetry of prose writing; there's an inevitability about its choice of beautiful and simple words that makes them seem a part of the nature they describe. For instance, to choose at random from a multitude of exquisite things: "... under the stars of this warm Southern night, burning its incense of trees and flowers"; or, "And he sat for a long time that evening under a large lime-tree on a knoll above the Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were now spreading over him this leafy peace--this blue-black shadow against the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women escaped for ever from love and longing? ... If only for a moment he could desert his own heart, and rest with the trees and stars!" With a single clause like "for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a summer night" Galsworthy gets effects that some poets need three or four verses for. In one place he defines for all time a Chopin mazurka as "a little dancing dirge of summer"; in another gives you with one stroke an impression of his hero that it's impossible to forget: "He looks as if he were seeing sands and lions." In the third place, Galsworthy's psychology is profound--impregnable. One simple characterization will serve to illustrate: he describes a man's face as having the candour of one at heart a child--"that simple candour of those who have never known how to seek adventures of the mind, and have always sought adventures of the body." As to the lesson of _The Dark Flower_--its philosophy, its "moral"--I can only say that it hasn't any such thing; that is, while it's full to the brim of philosophy, it doesn't attempt to force a philosophy upon you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that--which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-rate novelist you happen to admire; he'll give you characters who have a hard time of it and tell you just where they're right and where they're wrong. I can see how you feel you're getting more for your money. I can't help feeling that everything Galsworthy has done has had its special function in making _The Dark Flower_ possible. The sociology of _Fraternity_, the passionate pleading of _Justice_ and _Strife_, the incomparable emotional experiments of _A Commentary_, the intellectuality of _The Patrician_--all these have contributed to the noble simplicities and the noble beauty of _The Dark Flower_. The Garden My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own, Into thy garden; thine be happy hours Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers, From root to crowning petal thine alone.