Excerpt from John Galsworthy: An Appreciation and a Bibliography John Galsworthy is an artist in the sense that the Russian novelist Turgenev was an artist, and the great Frenchman, de Maupassant. These three writers do not try to give chunks of life in the rough, life just as it is, full of irrelevancies, crowded with distracting details and broken threads. Many modern writers have tried to reproduce this chaos, but the art I am speaking of is more exacting, it seeks to penetrate to the essentials so that it may interpret life, and to do this it must focus, eliminating what is not essential from what is. Self-restraint, delicacy, a fine sense of form, all are necessary to this type of art; no gush and no blood - and-thunder, and no intrusion of author standing between what he writes and his reader. That does not rule out personality; personality is like the scent of a flower - unseen but known, one of the most precious gifts of authorship. As an artist Galsworthy has made an extraordinary advance. Some writers produce a vivid personal work, a masterpiece perhaps quite early, and never reach that level of expression again. Galsworthy is not among these, he found himself gradually. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.