Commentery

1. The god of property and his Forsytes great and small…

In his first novel of the “Forsyte Saga”, “The Man of Property”, Jolyon (Jon’s father) says, the Forsytes are typical English middlemen, met everywhere commerce, science, religion and even art. He calls them pillars of society, whose man quality is their sense of property. [94]

In the cited phrase we find an allusion to Forsyte's worship of their idol — property, whose devoted servants they are.

2. It was love-in-a-mist — one of those illumined pages of Life...

Note the poetic description of Jon's feelings. Galsworthy describes the boy's fleeting emotional experience as something mysteriously blissful and beautiful. " Love-in-a-mist" here must be an allusion to Jon's being in a kind of mental haze. At the same time it has other associations, for it is the name of a West Indian Passion flower. The mention of " pages of Life" and " little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers and birds scrolled in among the text" is also highly sug­gestive of either children's books of fairy-tales or some eastern stories.

3. To have brought Fleur down openly — yes! But to sneak her in like this!

This is one of the instances of the so called represented speech in the extract.

Represented speech is neither direct speech, which reproduces the speaker's exact words, nor is it indirect speech. Represented speech differs from both direct and indirect speech in that it is a purely lit­erary phenomenon never appearing in oral style.

Usually it renders the character's thoughts which were not uttered aloud.

It is a powerful stylistic device commonly used in modern litera­ture to reveal the character's psychology or temporary mental state.

Though represented speech is neither direct nor indirect speech, it has some traits in common with both of them.

Like indirect speech represented speech is characterized by:

(a) the use of the third person of pronouns instead of the first per­son;

(b) the observance of the rule of sequence of tenses in independent sentences.

Like direct speech it is characterized by:

(a) the use of exclamatory, interrogative, and one-member sen­tences, the use of interjections and the words " yes" and " no";

(b) the use of words and expressions typical of the character's speech;

(c) the use of elliptical sentences.

It is characteristic of Galsworthy to include represented speech into the author's narration without any perceptible transition from one to the other. (See the text.)

4. Consumed with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.

Jon tried to conceal his shame and humiliation under an impudent (brazen) mask (front), but probably did not very much succeed in it for he was an open-hearted well-bred boy. In poetry and rhetoric " front" stands for " face" [95]

5. When he returned under cover of the maids and teapots...

It is a figurative expression which means that shuttling of tea-things and bustling of the maids distracted everybody's mind from what had happened and helped Jon to take himself in hand.