Take, for example, the scene in The Man of Property, when Irene returns to her husband, after having for the first time met Bosinney as a lover:
“He hardly recognised her. She seemed on fire, so deep and rich the colour of her cheeks, her eyes, her lips, and of the unusual blouse she wore. She was breathing fast and deep, as though she had been running, and with every breath perfume seemed to come from her hair, and from her body, like perfume from an opening flower.... He lifted his finger towards her breast, but she dashed his hand aside. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried. He caught her wrist; she wrenched it away. ‘And where have you been?’ he asked. ‘In heaven—out of this house!’ With those words she fled upstairs.... And Soames stood motionless. What prevented him from following her? Was it that, with the eyes of faith, he saw Bosinney looking down from that high window in Sloane Street, straining his eyes for yet another glimpse of Irene’s vanished figure, cooling his flushed face, dreaming of the moment when she flung herself on his breast—the scent of her still in the air around and the sound of her laugh that was like a sob?”
Next to a sense of situation Galsworthy must be granted a sense of atmosphere. This is due to the extraordinary sensitiveness he brings into his work, as distinct from penetration.
“Strong sunlight was falling on that little London garden, disclosing its native shadowiness; streaks and smudges such as Life smears over the faces of those who live too consciously. The late perfume of the lilac came stealing forth into the air faintly smeethed with chimney-smoke. There was brightness but no glory, in that little garden; scent, but no strong air blown across golden lakes of buttercups, from seas of springing clover, or the wind-silver of young wheat; music, but no full choir of sound, no hum.”
This passage from Fraternity shows Galsworthy’s peculiar grasp of subtleties, those pseudo-expressions of emotion in Nature, which only the sensitive can find in their less obvious aspects. For the more obvious aspects, he has not so much attention. He deals little with storms and furies, with nature as a power. Nature to him is rather an influence, a thing of crafty workings; and he loves above all others hours of pale sunlight, faint dawn, or, more still, twilight languid and hushed, full of troubled perfumes:
“All things waited. The creatures of night were slow to come forth after that long bright summer’s day, watching for the shades of the trees to sink deeper and deeper into the now chalk-white water; watching for the chalk-white face of the sky to be masked with velvet. The very black plumed trees themselves seemed to wait in suspense for the grape-bloom of night. All things stared, wan in that hour of passing day—all things had eyes wistful and unblessed.”[[1]]
[1]. The Dark Flower.
In the matter of style, Galsworthy is not a purist. One finds a split infinitive spoiling a procession of beautiful words, and one occasionally loses patience over a squad of panting verbless sentences all beginning with “And.” But he has a gift worth more than grammatical perfection, and that is a real sense of words. In their combinations, contrasts, and values, he marshals them with a poet’s strategy. He loves those words which hold their meanings as soldiers their weapons; one sees him apportioning the place of honour in a sentence, ranking the subordinates. He is so absolute a craftsman that we see in his occasional lapses more of a deliberate disregard than ignorance, and certainly nothing of the slipshod.