Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/118

 DOROTHY EASTON'S "THE GOLDEN BIRD"

By John Galsworthy

The sketch is, I take it, commonly supposed to be the easiest form that a writer can use, and the bad sketch probably is. The good sketch, on the other hand, is about the hardest, for there is no time to go wrong, or, rather, in which to recover if one does go wrong. Moreover, it demands a very faithful objectivity, and a rare sensitiveness of touch. The good sketcher does not bite off more than he or she can chew, does not waste a word, and renders into writing that alone which is significant. To catch the flying values of life, and convey them to other minds and hearts in a few pages of picture may seem easy to the lay reader, but is, I do assure him, mortal hard.

The sketches in this, the first book of a young writer, are so really good, that they should require no preliminary puff. But the fact is that the reading public in America and England get so few good sketches, indeed so few volumes of sketches at all, that even the best work of this kind has unfairly little chance.

If I know anything and I am not alone in my opinion, the writer of this book has a sympathetic apprehension of life, and a perfection in rendering it which is altogether out of the common. Those readers who want not snapshots but little pictures, entirely without preciosity, extraordinarily sensitive and faithful, and never dull, because they have real meaning and truth, will appreciate this volume. 86