2023年4月浙江自考英美文学选读复习笔记：John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) was born into an upper-middle-class family. He was educated first at Harrow and then at Oxford. Later he was trained to be a lawyer, but he did not like it. So after practising the law for a short time, he turned to literature. Galsworthy published his first book, From the Four Winds (a volume of short stories), in 1897 under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn. And in 1905 he married Ada, the spanorced wife of his cousin, whose unhappy life of the first marriage aroused his deep sympathy. These experiences were reflected in The Man of Property (1906), which together with his first play, The Silver Box (1906), established him as a prominent novelist and playwright in the public mind. Other novels and plays followed, but it was not until after the First World War that he completed The Forsyte Saga, his first trilogy: The Man of Property, In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). His second Forsyte trilogy, A Modern Comedy, appeared in 1929, and the third, End of the Chapter, posthumously in 1934.

Galsworthy was essentially a bourgeois liberal, a reformist. Throughout his life, he was occupied with the social injustice in his time. He regarded human life as a struggle between the rich and the poor. And his sympathy always went out to the suffering poor.  In his works, the two classes often appear in contrast: a dull, parasitic and inhuman class of the rich, which is against any kind of change; and an opssed, but rebellious and unyielding class of the poor, which is bent on reforming things. He battled for many liberal causes, from women's suffrage to the abolition of censorship. He was also a moralist and a critic whose primary aim as a writer was  not to create a new society but to criticize the existing one, though his final aim was to keep a balance between the rich and the poor.  His works were designed to help improve the status quo; there was no suggestion in them that society should be radically and painfully reconstructed if social enemies were to be reconciled and social ills remedied.

Galsworthy was a conventional writer, having inherited the fine traditions of the great Victorian novelists of the critical realism such as Dickens and Thackeray. He was also influenced by the continental novelists; he admired Maupassant for the vigor, economy and clarity of writing, Turgenev for the wisdom and naturalness, and Tolstoy for the depth of insight and the breadth of character drawing. He thought that he himself had learned more about the essentials of style from them than from any other writer. Technically, he was more traditional than adventurous, focusing on plot development and character portrayal. With an objective observation and a naturalistic description, Galsworthy had tried his best to make an impartial sentation of the social life in a documentary cision. By emphasizing the critical element in his writing, he dauntlessly laid bare the true features of the good and the evil of the bourgeois society. He was also successful in his attempt to sent satire and humor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and untentious style with a clear and straightforward language.