“The Dark Flower” and the “Moralists”
Margaret C. Anderson
The Dark Flower, by John Galsworthy. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.)
A book that has beauty as it’s given to few books to achieve it has been the innocent cause of more ignorant, naïve, and stupid condemnation than anything published for a long time. Even the English critics—who usually avoid these shallows—in several cases hit the rocks with awful force. And all because a man with the soul of the old gods chose to tell, quite simply and with inexpressible beauty, the truth about an artist. The Dark Flower was everybody’s opportunity to deepen his vision, but nearly everybody decided to look upon it as an emotional redundancy. Perhaps this doesn’t do some of them justice: I believe a good many of them considered it positively dangerous!
My quite spontaneous tribute to Galsworthy’s Mark Lennan—before I’d heard anyone discuss him—was that here was a man a woman would be glad to trust her soul to. And, in view of how silly it is for a woman to trust her soul to anyone but herself, I still insisted that one could do it with Mark Lennan: because he’d not take charge of anyone’s soul!—his wife’s least of all. Of course, to love a man of his sort would mean unhappiness; but women who face life with any show of bravery face unhappiness as part of the day’s work. It remains to decide whether one will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or play safe and take a pale joy in one’s unscarred condition. With Mark Lennan a woman would have had—à la Browning—her perfect moment; and such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary.
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.
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.”