10. Critical Realism of the Early XX century. J.Galsworthy, h.G.Wells, b.Shaw and their major works.

LITERATURE OF THE EARLY 20th CENTURY

The Boer War lasted from October 1899 to May 1902. The English suffered many difficulties and losses at the beginning of the war, but they came out of it victors. However, this victory did not improve the negative attitude of progressive people in England towards bourgeois ideology and culture, towards its social life and economic development. During the 1890s critical realism continued to develop in the works of many writers. One of them was George Meredith (1828—1909). He is considered to be a master of irony. In his novel The Egoist he drew a portrait of a typical representative of the upper strata of English society and revealed the egoism that ruled their lives.

Samuel Butler (1835—1902) was another critical realist of those years, who analysed the psychology of the bourgeoisie. His best known work is The Way of All Flesh, in which he depicted a clergyman's family, for whom money was the most important thing in life.

Probably the most outstanding novelist of those years was Thomas Hardy (1840—1928). He was born and lived most of his life in one of the Southwest rural counties of England, Dorsetshire, which is called Wessex in his novels. He began by portraying idyllic pictures of country life, and little by little took up tragic themes in such novels as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. 109I and 1891 Hardy wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles which, as a challenge to puritan bigotry, he called "the story of a pure woman". It is the tragedy of a poor girl, whose life is broken by the bigotry of society in that period.

Jude the Obscure, which is considered to be Hardy's best novel, was written in 1895. In it he continued to develop his theme. Jude, a gifted boy who grows up into a talented man, goes through life seeing all his hopes and expectations shattered. He belongs to the lower classes of society and every road of life seems to be closed to him. After a life of countless sufferings he dies a young man with the words "Let the day perish wherein I was born" on his lips. Hardy differed from other critical realists of the 19"' century in that his criticism of society developed into a psychology of pessimism. He was one of the last representatives of the old patriarchal farmer's England and saw in the villages the terrible effects of capitalism that spoiled the life of their inhabitants; this gave rise to his tragic world outlook.

A follower of the great traditions of the critical realists, whose life and works span practically a hundred years, is Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864—1960). She was the daughter of a prominent English mathematician, George Boole. Her mother, Mary Everest, was the niece of a famous engineer and geographer, George Everest (after whom Mount Everest, the highest peak of the Himalayas was named). Ethel Lilian Boole studied at the Berlin conservatory and in 1887—1889 worked in Russia as a governess. In 1890 she married a Polish revolutionary, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, who fled from tsarist exile to London. All her novels of the end of the century are a reflection of revolutionary movement, for Voynich was very close to Russian members of the "Narodnaya Volia", especially to Stepniak-Kravchinsky.

The Gadfly (1897), her masterpiece, is the story of a young man, Arthur Burton, one of the leaders in the struggle of the Italian people against Austrian religious and social oppression during the 1840s. To his underground friends Arthur is known under the name of the Gadfly. In this novel, one of the strongest among atheist fiction in world literature, we see better than in any of her other works connection of Voynich's creative art with the revolutionary romantic traditions of English letters. It is not mere chance that Shelley is the favourite poet of Gemma Warren, Arthur's beloved. The novel is written with courage, all the more notable in that it was finished on the eve of the Boer War, at a time of the violent imperialist reaction. In the character of the Gadfly Voynich portrayed the main features of progressive people. Her peculiarity lies in the exceptional interest she shows in the lives of other peoples — a fact that is entirely inherited from the romanticists — peoples of Italy, Russia and France. This is her own, special way of expressing her patriotism, for while describing other peoples and other customs she never forgot her own country just like the great revolutionary romanticists Byron and Shelley.

During the last decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century three names were prominent among the among the writers who continued the traditions of critical realism. They were Galsworthy, Herbert G. Wells and the great playwright Bernard Shaw. All three possessed remarkable individual talent and developed critical realism along their own, individual lines.

JOHN GALSWORTHY came of well-to-do bourgeois family; after graduating from Oxford Univercity he became a lawyer but soon abandoned this profession to take up literature. He began to write in the last years of the 19th century, but his first works were not very successful. His best novels were written in the first decade of the 20th century. In them the reader finds a reflection of the opposition of the progressive-minded people to imperialism, to Britain's Boer War adventure. In 1904 Galsworthy wrote The Island Pharisees. In it he attacked the British privileged classes. He criticized them for being content with the bourgeois way of life; he stressed the fact that their minds had become inert and lazy. In 1906 Galsworthy's best novel appeared. It was The Man of Property. He achieved great heights of generalization in this work. In it he told the story of the upper middle class that dictated its laws to the country. During the period 1907—1918 Galsworthy turned to different subjects. He wrote many novels and plays. His main object, however, always remained that of reflecting social contradictions and trying to find a humanist solution to them. Galsworthy paid great attention to the composition of his novels. Thus, the composition of The Man of Property is thoroughly worked out. The events are presented so vividly that the chapters may be easily staged, for instance At Home, Dinner at Swithin 's, June's Treat and others.

Galsworthy's "feeling" for the language may be compared with a painter's "feeling" for colour. His choice of words is so accurate that it is difficult to paraphrase his sentences. He makes use of irony when describing his characters and the weaknesses of his own class. John Galsworthy's contribution to the development of the English novel was very important. He was nearer than Wells and Shaw to his predecessors, the critical realists of the first half of the 19th century. Galsworthy brought the novel back to its former heights by creating a real "document" of the epoch, a deep, realistic picture of the bourgeois class. The Forsyte Saga, his greatest achievement, is the culmination of English critical realism of the early 20thcentury.

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866—1946)

Herbert G. Wells was born in a poor family. In his youth he worked very hard, and, at the same time, managed to get an education. He became a biologist and for some time worked as assistant to a well-known English scientist, a follower of Charles Darwin. When Wells was quite young he became interested in social problems. He always called himself a socialist, but his socialism was very peculiar. He understood that the world had to be changed. At an early age he came to the Utopian conclusion that only scientists and technicians could solve the existing contradictions. According to Wells it was not revolution, but evolution — through certain reforms — that could change the world. And only science and technology could do it.

World War I came as a shock to Wells. He could no longer be sure of peaceful progress. The October Revolution was, in his opinion, a social "experiment". He did not have much faith in it. However, in 1920 he visited Russia and was received by V. Lenin in Moscow. During his stay in Russia, Wells saw the devastation of the country. He described his impressions of this visit in his book Russia in the Shadows and called Lenin "the Kremlin dreamer".

In Wells' novels science and technology form the background against which the plot develops. Besides this, there is always a very strong social aspect in his works. In this connection Wells always said that he was a follower of Swift. Swift's Gulliver's Travels, he pointed out, was also based on fantasy. This fantasy Served as a basis for social criticism. His early cycle of science fiction was written from 1895 to 1901. Among the works of those years were The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men on the Moon and others. In the novels of this cycle Wells wrote about the fate of civilization. This was his main theme In The Island of Dr. Moreau he warned humanity against reckless experimentation. A later cycle of novels was written between 1901 and World War I. In these he reflected on the fate of mankind. Among them were The War in the Air, The World Set Free and others. After World War I, Well turned to the genre of the social novels. After his trip to the USSR he returned to social fantasies. In these novels he tried to reflect the danger of fascism in his country and in the rest of the world.

THE WAR OF WORLDS This novel is many-levelled. We hear the author's question, addressed to all mankind: "What will happen to humanity if cold intellect triumphs over feelings and emotions?" This question is, at the same time, a call to people to reorganize their way of life. And, above all, it is a warning to humanity to avoid destructive wars. Thus, Wells revealed in his novels the possible negative consequences of technical progress. He showed how tragic the achievements in science could be if they were applied with destructive intentions. The pessimistic theme that the earth is a temporary phenomenon, and that the human race is determined to destroy itself, permeates all his work.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856—1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a middle class family. In 1876 he came to London. After an unsuccessful career as a novelist he wrote art, music and book criticism for several periodicals. In his articles on drama he protested against the artificiality of the London theatre which at that time was full of shallow sentimental plays. He demanded that theatres should perform plays dealing with contemporary social and moral problems and should rouse people, make them think and suffer.

He called the first cycle of his dramatic works — Widower's Houses (1892), The Philanderer (1893) and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894)—Plays Unpleasant. They were unfavourably received by the public because they unmasked bourgeois espectability by exposing the true source of rich families' wealth. It were his witty comedies to which he gave the name Plays Pleasant—Arms and the Man (1894), The Man of Destiny (1895), etc. — that established his popularity. In these, as well as in Caesar and Cleopatra, he destroyed romantic illusions about some historical personages and showed the true motives of human actions.

Shaw wrote over 50 plays including John Bull's Other Island (1904) and Saint Joan (1923). In the former he criticized England's colonial policy in Ireland. In the latter he gave his own dramatic interpretation of the character of Joan of Arc, the national heroine of France, also called the Maid of Orleans, who fought against the Englishmen during the One Hundred Years' War. One of his best known works is the comedy Pygmalion (1913), later turned into a popular musical My Fair Lady. His plays are, as a rule, based on paradoxical situations and dramatic discussions; they are full of brilliant witty dialogues. A lot of his remarks have become well known aphorisms. Here are a few of them:

— A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself and hates them for it.

— A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

— He who can, does, he who can't, teaches.

— The test of a man's or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Shaw was always very active in political and social life of his country. In his younger years he joined several literary and political societies. Thus, he was a member of the Fabian society which advocated gradual reforms as a way of social reorganisation, opposed to immediate revolutionary action. In his numerous essays he set down his socialist and collectivist principles; he supported women's rights, abolition of private property and radical changes in the voting system. He also stood for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English alphabet. Omission of the apostrophe in all contracted verb forms in his plays (cant for can't, youre for you're, whats for what's, etc.) Is due to his hope to initiate these

Changes with his own writing. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.