December 31, 1900

12.1.2. One of the most popular English novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century was John Galsworthy (1867-1933). It was in the early 1890s that he abandoned law (he had been admitted to the bar in 1890) and took up writing. Galsworthy wrote his early works under the pen name John Sinjohn.

His fiction is concerned principally with the realistic portrayal of English upper middle-class life; his dramas frequently find their themes in this stratum of society, but also often deal, sympathetically, with the economically and socially oppressed and with questions of social justice. Most of his novels deal with the history, from Victorian times through the first quarter of the 20th century, of an upper middle-class English family, the Forsytes. The principal member of the family is Soames Forsyte, who exemplifies the drive of his class for the accumulation of material wealth, a drive that often conflicts with human values.

(…) The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly, at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth – a distinguishing elegance – and so far had not spoken a word.

(…) She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for her – yes, and with an ache in his heart – that she should sit there, looking – looking as if she saw the walls of the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave the table.

The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms – Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made a strange contrast with her dark brown eyes.

Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive and full of common sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.

Out of his property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.

The Forsyte series includes The Man of Property (1906), the novelette “Indian Summer of a Forsyte”, In Chancery, Awakening, and To Let. These five titles were published as The Forsyte Saga (1922). The Forsyte story was continued by Galsworthy in The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, and Swan Song, which were published together under the title A Modern Comedy (1929). Galsworthy was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in literature.

12.2. Эстетизм и символизм в литературе. Жизнь и творчество Оскара Уайльда. «Портрет Дориана Грея». Уайльд как драматург, поэт и критик.

During late Victorian times, the aesthetic movement flourished, based on the principle of art for art’s sake. English writers Walter Pater and John Ruskin were the authors who formulated the basic ideas of the movement. The author who happened to become the chief proponent of their ideas was Oscar Wilde.

12.2.1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic. He was born in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his mother’s Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote poetry, and incorporated the Bohemian life-style of his youth into a unique way of life. The eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches. His rooms were filled with various objects of art. His wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.

After a highly successful lecture tour of the United States, Wilde returned to England and settled in London. He married a wealthy Irish woman, with whom he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing. In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde was convicted of sodomy. Sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he died of meningitis on November 30, 1900.

Wilde’s early works included two collections of fairy stories, which he wrote for his sons, and a group of short stories. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gra y (1891), is a melodramatic tale of moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story frankly commits him to a moral stand against self-debasement.

Wilde’s most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all characterized by engaging plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them such famous inverted proverbs as “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written just after his release and published anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. Wilde, the artist, now is recognized as a brilliant social commentator, whose best work remains worthwhile and relevant.

12.2.2. Another Irishman contributed greatly to the school of symbolism in English literature. His name is William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

He was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. In his early twenties, he moved with his family to London and became interested in Hinduism, theosophy, and occultism. He wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes in the romantic melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. On a visit to Ireland he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly the rest of his life. She inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence.

Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896. He helped found the famous Abbey Theatre. As its director and dramatist, he helped develop the theater into one of the leading theatrical companies of the world, and a center of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance.

INTO THE TWILIGHT

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,

Dew ever shining and twilight grey;

Though hope fall from you and love decay,

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of sun and moon and hollow and wood

And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,

And time and the world are ever in flight;

And love is less kind than the grey twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

In his poetry of this period, Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. His work, now less mystical and symbolic, became clearer and leaner. As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving in the Senate of the new Irish Free State. He also accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. He received the Nobel Prize in 1923.

12.3. Неоромантическая традиция в английской литературе. Творчество Роберта Льюиса Стивенсона. Неоромантизм Редьярда Киплинга. Тема «бремени белого человека» в его творчестве и ее аллегорическое осмысление в «Книге джунглей».

A second and younger group of novelists displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the short story.

12.3.1. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is a Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet. He also contributed several classic works to children's literature. Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh. Since childhood, however, Stevenson's natural inclination had been toward literature, and he eventually started writing seriously.

Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and often traveled in search of warm climates to ease his illness. His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys —for example, Travels with a Donkey in the Cavennes (1879), an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France. Later he traveled to California, where he married an American divorcee. Eventually they sailed from San Francisco on a cruise across the South Pacific and settled in Samoa in a final effort to restore Stevenson's health. The writer died there five years later.

Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and fantasy stories. Treasure Island is a swiftly paced story of a search for buried gold involving the boy hero Jim Hawkins and the evil pirates Pew and Long John Silver. In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the extremes of good and evil appear startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde. Stevenson's other adventure stories include The Black Arrow.

Stevenson wrote skillfully in a variety of genres. He employed the forms of essay and literary criticism, and wrote travel and autobiographical pieces. The collection A Child's Garden of Verses contains some of Stevenson's best-known and finest poems for children.

WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN

A child should always say what's true

And speak when he is spoken to,

And behave mannerly at table:

At least as far as he is able.

12.3.2. (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English writer and Nobel laureate, who wrote novels, poems, and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma during the time of British rule. Kipling was born in India, and at age six, was sent to be educated in England. He later returned to India and edited and wrote short stories for the Civil and Military Gazette. In his early twenties, he published Departmental Ditties, satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British colonial India, and a collection of stories called Plain Tales from the Hills.

Kipling's literary reputation was established by six stories of English life in India, that revealed his profound identification with, and appreciation for, the land and people of India. Thereafter he traveled extensively in Asia and the United States, married an American, lived briefly in Vermont, and finally settled in England. He was a prolific writer; most of his work attained wide popularity. He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature, the first English author to be so honored.

Kipling is regarded as one of the greatest English short-story writers. As a poet he is remarkable for rhymed verse written in the slang used by the ordinary British soldier. His writings consistently project three ideas: intense patriotism, the duty of the English to lead lives of strenuous activity, and England's destiny to become a great empire. His insistent imperialism was an echo of the Victorian past of England.

Among Kipling's important short fictional works are The Jungle Book, and The Second Jungle Book, collections of animal stories, which many consider his finest writing; and Just So Stories for Little Children. The highly popular novels or long narratives include The Light That Failed (1891), about a blind artist. Among his collections of verse are Barrack-Room Ballads.

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN (extract)

Take up the White Man's burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden –

No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper –

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go make them with your living,

And mark them with your dead!

12.4. Утопии и антиутопии конца XIX века. Различные способы критики социальной действительности в произведениях Герберта Уэллса, Бернарда Шоу, Уильяма Морриса, Уильяма Сомерсета Моэма.

The critical and satirical streak in literature was becoming ever so intense in the writings of the late Victorian period.

12.4.1. One of them was Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Rather than becoming a clergyman, as his father wished, Butler immigrated to New Zealand, where he was a successful sheep rancher. At 30, he returned to England. Butler is best known for his satirical works. In Erewhon ( 1872), the story of an imaginary land, he criticized the customs and manners of contemporary England. His most important work is the novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), published posthumously. It is a satirical autobiographical study of mid-Victorian family life.

12.4.2. Not only was William Morris (1834-1896) a poet and artist but he was also a socialist reformer, who urged a return to medieval traditions of design, craftsmanship, and community. Morris devoted most of his time to architecture and painting. He even formed a decorating firm in partnership several Pre-Raphaelite painters. The firm designed and manufactured decorations such as carvings, metalwork, stained glass, and carpeting. These products were noted for their fine workmanship and natural beauty. Morris was active in politics but without losing interest in art and letters. He helped to establish the Socialist League, editing and contributing to its magazine. He described a fictitious socialist commonwealth in England in News from Nowhere (1891). In his political writings, he attempted to correct the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution by proposing a form of society in which people could enjoy craftsmanship and simplicity of expression.

12.4.3. Another tireless critic of the society was George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). He is considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. Shaw was the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions.

Shaw was born in Dublin. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876. The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty. Only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers. By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. Many more plays followed. Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1913), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays which explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed. For Saint Joan, Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance.

12.4.4. M ost famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare is Herbert George Wells (1866-1946). In 50 years he produced more than 80 books. As a young man, he worked as a draper's apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist. His literary career began with the novel The Time Machine ( 1895). It mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds.

Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation which depict members of the lower middle class and their aspirations. Many of Wells' other books can be categorized as thesis novels. Among these are Ann Veronica, promoting women's rights, and Tono-Bungay, attacking irresponsible capitalists. Throughout his long life Wells was deeply concerned with and wrote voluminously about the survival of contemporary society. For a time he was a member of the Fabian Society. He envisioned a utopia in which the vast and frightening material forces available to modern men and women would be rationally controlled for progress and for the equal good of all. His later works were increasingly pessimistic. He castigated most world leaders and expressed the author's doubts about the ability of humankind to survive.

12.4.5. Another English author, whose works began to appear in late Victorian times, was William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). His first novel came out in 1897 based on his experience of living in South London as a young man. His partially autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and is one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. The Moon and Sixpence is a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. He was also a brilliant short story writer.

12.5. Развлекательная литература. Литература для детей и юношества.

12.5.1. The variety of late Victorian literature was incredibly rich. There was room for everyone, especially for those who wanted to entertain in the first place. It was good, solid fiction, it was indeed.

In the early 1880s, Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) returned to England from South Africa. He devoted most of his time to agriculture, on his estate, and to writing novels. And popular writing it was! His King Solomon's Mines (1885) was an immediate success; its story, suggested by the ruins at Zimbabwe, dealt with the adventures of an English explorer among remote tribes. The characters who appeared in the book were featured in several others, including She and Allan Quatermain. Haggard wrote more than 40 novels.

The year 1887 saw the publication of the short story A Study in Scarlet, the first of 60 stories featuring the character of Sherlock Holmes. Thecreator of the unforgettable master sleuth was Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). By the way, the characterization of Holmes, his ability of ingenious deductive reasoning, was based on one of the author's own university professors. Equally brilliant creations are those of Holmes's foils: his friend Dr. Watson, the good-natured narrator of the stories, and the master criminal Professor Moriarty. Conan Doyle was so immediately successful in his literary career that approximately five years later he abandoned his medical practice to devote his entire time to writing. The Holmes stories made Conan Doyle internationally famous and served to popularize the detective-story genre. Conan Doyle's literary versatility brought him almost equal fame for his historical romances such as Rodney Stone.

At that time Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) turned his attention to writing and editing after clerking, teaching, and acting without much success. It well may be that Three Men in a Boat (1889) represents his greatest success as a novelist. Reminiscent of Mark Twain's travel writings, this work combines wit and anecdote with common sense and compelling description.

Another important entertainer of the period is Irish-born Bram Stoker (1847-1912). His classic novel of horror, Dracula (1897), introduced the character of the vampire Count Dracula of Transylvania. Dracula has inspired numerous films, sequels, and retellings.

12.5.2. Literature for young readers really flourished during the period. B orn in Manchester, Frances Burnett (1849-1924) immigrated to the United States at the close of the American Civil War. She is the author of the well-known children's books Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1911). The books are still popular today.

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is best known for children's books such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children (1906), both of which are stories about sets of brothers and sisters and their adventures. It is interesting to know that Nesbit and George Bernard Shaw were founding members of the socialist, educational Fabian Society. Although she mainly thought of herself as a poet, her poetry and novels have been largely forgotten, as her strength was writing for children. Many of Nesbit's books for children, which are classics, describe a fantastic dimension, where the protagonists, for example, travel through time, or conduct various experiments with magic talismans, as in Five Children and It (1902). The most memorable feature of Nesbit's writing for children, however, is the humor she achieves as a result of adopting a child's perspective toward adult behavior and the adult world.

The British author Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a bank manager in his early life. He retired after the publication of his most successful work, The Wind in the Willows (1908), a fantasy about Mole, Rat, and other animals in the English countryside that appeals to both adults and children.

In the mid-1880s, James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), Scottish dramatist and novelist, settled in London. The year 1891 saw the publication of The Little Minister, a romantic novel of love and adventure. The first performance of Barrie's now world-famous fairy-tale play, Peter Pan, took place in 1904. In this fantasy, Barrie dealt with his two favorite themes, the retention of childish innocence and what he conceived to be the feminine instinct for motherhood.

12.5.3. There was one other author whose life still captivates millions of people around the world. That woman, Ethel Lillian Voynich, was born in 1860 and lived to the age of 96. She was the daughter of a famous mathematician and a feminist writer. She was niece of the Himalayas explorer Sir Everest. She knew Wilde and Shaw in London. She traveled to Russia with a revolutionary mission. In 1897 she published The Gadfly, a highly romantic yet realistic treatment of the liberation period in Italy concerning the activities of the international republican agent Arthur Burton who successfully eludes the Austro-Hungarian policy and contributes to the revolutionary cause. The book sold 2,500,000 copies world-wide and an additional 5 million in Russian. In the USSR, it was the top best seller and compulsory reading there, and was seen as ideologically useful. But it really is a good book, indeed so. Many a young reader read the last pages of the book with misty eyes.

"… She stood still for a little while with the paper in her hand; then sat down by the open window to read. The letter was closely written in pencil, and in some parts hardly legible. But the first two words stood out quite clear upon the page; and they were in English:

"Dear Jim."

The writing grew suddenly blurred and misty. And she had lost him again – had lost him again! At the sight of the familiar childish nickname all the hopelessness of her bereavement came over her afresh, and she put out her hands in blind desperation, as though the weight of the earth-clods that lay above him were pressing on her heart.

Presently she took up the paper again and went on reading:

"I am to be shot at sunrise to-morrow. So if I am to keep at all my promise to tell you everything, I must keep it now. But, after all, there is not much need of explanations between you and me. We always understood each other without many words, even when we were little things.

"And so, you see, my dear, you had no need to break your heart over that old story of the blow. It was a hard hit, of course; but I have had plenty of others as hard, and yet I have managed to get over them, -- even to pay back a few of them, -- and here I am still, like the mackerel in our nursery-book (I forget its name), 'Alive and kicking, oh!' This is my last kick, though; and then, to-morrow morning, and--'Finita la Commedia!'

You and I will translate that: 'The variety show is over'; and will give thanks to the gods that they have had, at least, so much mercy on us. It is not much, but it is something; and for this and all other blessings may we be truly thankful!

"About that same to-morrow morning, I want both you and Martini to understand clearly that I am quite happy and satisfied, and could ask no better thing of Fate. Tell that to Martini as a message from me; he is a good fellow and a good comrade, and he will understand. You see, dear, I know that the stick-in-the-mud people are doing us a good turn and themselves a bad one by going back to secret trials and executions so soon, and I know that if you who are left stand together steadily and hit hard, you will see great things. As for me, I shall go out into the courtyard with as light a heart as any child starting home for the holidays. I have done my share of the work, and this death-sentence is the proof that I have done it thoroughly. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man's heart desire?

"It desires just one thing more, though. A man who is going to die has a right to a personal fancy, and mine is that you should see why I have always been such a sulky brute to you, and so slow to forget old scores. Of course, though, you understand why, and I tell you only for the pleasure of writing the words. I loved you, Gemma, when you were an ugly little girl in a gingham frock, with a scratchy tucker and your hair in a pig-tail down your back; and I love you still. Do you remember that day when I kissed your hand, and when you so piteously begged me 'never to do that again'? It was a scoundrelly trick to play, I know; but you must forgive that; and now I kiss the paper where I have written your name. So I have kissed you twice, and both times without your consent.

"That is all. Good-bye, my dear."

There was no signature, but a verse which they had learned together as children was written under the letter:

"Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live

Or if I die."

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