Modern English and American literature

Galsworthy was also a great playwright of his time. In his plays he is a social reformer, but too often he is only an observer, trying to mete out equal justice for both sides. His best plays such as Strife (1909), The Silver Box (1909), Justice (1910), which is concerned with the evils of the prison system, and The Loyalties (1922), by many regarded as Galsworthy's best play, attack the most pressing social issues of the day. His Strife treats of industrial warfare in tin-plate works on the borders of England and Wales. The central theme is that of class distinction. In the play The Silver Box he shows the difference between the rich and the poor in the interpretation of the law. In the tragedy Justice the barbarity of the English Penal Code is revealed; we see that “justice” is kinder to the rich man than to his poorer brother. His plays, like his novels, are often didactic; that is to say, they are directed not towards entertainment but towards enlightening the minds of their audiences, towards guiding them to the solution of social problems and to the clearing up of social abuses. They are full of ideas and thoughts, they are intellectually stimulating.

Galsworthy is not only a novelist and a dramatist, but also a short story writer and an essayist. His short stories give a most complete, and critical picture of English bourgeois society in the first part of the XX century. It is in his short stories that Galsworthy deals with the most vital problems of the day - he condemns the imperialist war, exposes capitalism that brings suffering and unemployment to the people, showing his sympathy for the so-called “little men” and reflecting their hard life and tragic fate, though his characters are mostly members of the upper middle-class, with which he was wholly familiar.

Galsworthy is a great master of exciting plots, realistic depiction of life and characters, of critical attitude towards national prejudices. He tried to revive the realistic traditions of his predecessors - the writers belonging to “the brilliant school of English novelists.” Though Galsworthy's criticism is not as sharp and acute as that of Dickens and Thackeray, he is justly considered to be one of the greatest realists of his time. The novels and plays of Galsworthy give a most complete picture of English bourgeois society in the XX century. A bourgeois himself Galsworthy nevertheless clearly sees the decline of his class and truthfully portrays this in his works. To him it is not man who is wicked-but society that is wrong. He believes in man as all humanists do. Yet one cannot help seeing the limitations of Galsworthy's realism. His criticism of the bourgeoisie is ethical and esthetic only. He aims to improve his class, but in no case does he want it to lose its ruling position. The descriptive talent of the author, the richness of his style, sincerity and keen sense of beauty put Galsworthy on the level with the most prominent writers of world literature.

The Forsyte Saga

The Man of Property. At the beginning of the novel we see the Forsyte family in full plumage. All the Forsytes gather at the house of old Jolyon to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon's granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. Old Jolyon is the head of the family, eighty years of age with his white hair, his domelike forehead and an immense white moustache, he holds himself extremely upright and seems master of perennial youth. He and his five brothers and four sisters (James, Timothy, Nickolas, Rodger and others) represent the first generation of the Forsytes. All of them are rich businessmen, heads of various firms and companies - big landowners, salesmen, lawyers, publishers. With distrust and uneasiness they watch June's fiancé - a young architect without any fortune. In their opinion Jolyon ought never to have allowed the engagement. Bosinney seems to be an impractical fellow with no sense of property, while the Forsytes consider property to be a sacred thing, the object of worship and respect. Their aim of life is to enlarge their wealth by all means. They are clinging to any kind of property - money, wives, reputation.

The most typical man of property is Soames Forsyte, a representative of the second generation of the Forsytes. Soames' sacred sense of property even extends to works of art, human feelings and family relations.

Having married Irene, 20-year old daughter of a poor professor, a woman who has never loved him, Soames treats her as though she were his property. “Out of his other 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. In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body - if he indeed could do that, which he was beginning to doubt.”

Wanting to get his beautiful wife out of London, away from opportunities of meeting people, Soames decides to build a house in the country. He asks Bosinney to design the house, because he thinks that Bosinney will be easy to deal with in money matters. Irene falls in love with the young architect, and Soames, driven by jealousy, brings a suit against Bosinney for having exceeded the sum of money which had been fixed for the construction of the house. On the day of the trial Bosinney meets with a tragic death. Being passionately in love with Irene and depressed by the hopeless state of affairs he wanders aimlessly in the foggy streets of London and is run over by an omnibus. Irene leaves Soames. But she is forced to return to him though not for a long time. The new house remains empty and deserted.

“The Man of Property” represents a typical bourgeois who is a slave of property, which is to him not only money, houses and land, but also his wife, the works of art and the talent of artists whose works he buys. Soames believes that the souls and thoughts, ideas and love, the inspiration of a genius, the kindness and sympathy of a warm heart are all to be bought for their value in money. In his conversation with Philip Bosinney young Jolyon, a painter, the son of old Jolyon says: “We are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit that it's a question of degree; but what I call a “Forsyte” is a man who is decidedly more or less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property - it doesn't matter whether it be wives, houses, money, reputation - is his hallmark.”

Although Galsworthy depicts a concrete family of men of property - the Forsytes - he shows us at the same time the life of the class which rules the country, the upper-middle class. Every Forsyte feels great pleasure speaking about money matters. If he sees anything, he immediately states the value of it.

Extreme individualism, egoism, snobbery, an ability never to give oneself away, contempt for everything “foreign”, a sense of property and money-worship - these are the most characteristic features of the Forsytes. The collision between the sense of property and money-worship, on the one hand, and true love and a keen sense of beauty, on the other, is the main theme of the novel. Irene symbolizes beauty, Bossiney - art. But the above mentioned characters are not as vivid and full-blooded as those of the Forsytes. They are created to contrast the Forsyte clan and its evil qualities.

The second and the third novels of the trilogy - In Chancery and To Let tell about the marriage of Soames with a French girl Annet who is 20 years his junior. She doesn't love him, but she is practical. This marriage produces an heir - the daughter Fleur. Irene marries young Jolyon and they have a son - John. They represent the third generation of the Forsytes. The young people fall in love with each other, but Irene can not bear the idea of her son being in love with the daughter of the man whom she hates. They send John off to America to separate two young loving souls. Robin Hill house is sold. Hence, the title To Let. This is the end of the Forsytes efflorescence.

A Modern Comedy.

The second trilogy opens with The White Monkey. Galsworthy shows habits, customs, views and psychology of the so-called “lost generation”. The typical figure of this generation is Wilfred Desert, a poet, who falls in love with Fleur, but she refuses him and he leaves England and spends many years in the East. Fleur still longs for John. But she is hot a girl to waste time and she decided that it was better to have whatever life held for her and she soon marries Michael Mont. Fleur is the very image of colour and vitality. She is sly and cunning, acute and clever, she is self-possessed and self-restrained, she has a ready answer for everything and everybody. She could keep on the tracks she was on. She is overflowing with health and life. She is a marvel of energy. The title of the novel is allegorical. Once Soames bought a picture with a monkey eating an orange. Her eyes express the tragedy of a human soul - it seems to the monkey that there is something hidden in the orange she is trying to peel off, she tries to find it but in vain, and she is unhappy and angry. When Michael Mont saw the picture he said that it should be placed in the British Museum under the title “Civilization as it is”.

The meaning of the second novel The Silver Spoon is disclosed in the phrase concerning Fleur, Wilfred Desert, Fleur's son Kit and others. All of them were born with the silver spoon in the mouth. “Since their birthday they had everything they needed. There was only one thing for them to do - to puzzle over something, to seek what else they could have.” Again the author pictures the aristocratic society allegorically, in the image of an old toothless woman sucking a silver spoon. She fears to let the spoon out of her mouth and at the same time she is no longer able to keep it in her mouth.

End of the Chapter

The third trilogy End of the Chapter shows the decay of an aristocratic family. We meet many young people of the new generation, among them Dinny Cherrel, who is opposed to empty society. She has the aim in her life - to save the family from ruin. Dinny is a remarkable young woman with lots of qualities (plenty of pluck, singular power of acumen, natural spring of wit not devoid of humour). But the greatest testimony to her character lies in her transparent honesty. It is out of her character to tell lies; she likes a straight deal in everything. She is as straight as a die. Dinny is a marvel of energy. Being in the know that her brother's reputation is aspersed she sets her mind on pulling useful strings to vindicate Hubert's honour without thinking of herself.

Talking of relations between men and women Dinny is of the opinion that affection should come first. The giving of her heart would be no rushing affair. As her old Scotch nurse used to say “Dinny knows on how many toes a pussy-cat goes.” No wonder she receives her due of respect and admiration on the part of everybody. No wonder that Hallorsen took a toss over her and Alan Fasburgh fell for her charms on sight.

We again meet Wilfred Desert who returned from the East. Wilfred Desert is brightly portrayed by the author. He is a tall young man of about thirty four, with a disdainful look about his mouth, with daring and compelling face, whose eyes were his best point. He comes from an old family and has a streak of the wanderer in him. His face gave the impression of spiritual struggle and disharmony, of dreaming, suffering and discovery. Though on his own admission he got over the war there were in him nerves not yet mended up. Wilfred is acutely unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though a good angel and a bad one were for ever seeking to fire each other out. Wilfred is suffering from a deep spiritual discontent. He is at odds with himself according to Dinny. He has sort of enmity against people and life and his not shared love for Fleur started him as a rolling stone. He went to seek sanctuary in the East. The greatest testimony to his character is that he could see through any falsity, for it was alien to his nature.

On his return to England Wilfred Desert finds himself in complete isolation because being in the East he recanted at the pistol point and took mohammedism under the threat of life. He felt sorry that he stifled his first instinct which was to say: shoot and be damned. It was not cowardice. It was just better scorn that men can waste each other's life for beliefs that seemed to him equally futile. Dinny and Wilfred love each other. But although Dinny is ready to fight for him and help him he again leaves England and parishes in the East.

T.S. Eliot

1888-1965

At the time when he was regarded as America's most eminent living poet, T.S. Eliot announced that he was an “Anglo-Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics, and a classicist in literature.” T.S. Eliot's family was rooted in New England, yet he was born into a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was the chancellor of Washington University. Eliot's childhood awareness of his native city would show itself in his poetry, but only after he had moved far away from St. Louis. During his years as an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot published a number of poems in The Harvard Advocate, the school literary magazine. In 1910 he earned his master's degree in philosophy. In the same year he completed his first important poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This poem was published in the magazine Poetry. He graduated from Harvard and went on to postgraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Just before the outbreak of World War I, Eliot took up residence in London, the city that would become his home for the rest of his life. There he worked for a time in a bank, suffered a nervous breakdown, married an emotionally troubled Englishwoman, and finally took up the business of literature. He became active as a publisher in the outstanding firm of Faber & Faber, and, on his own, edited The Criterion, a literary magazine. As a critic, he was responsible for reviving interest in many neglected poets, notably the seventeenth-century poet John Donne.

In 1927, Eliot gave up his American citizenship and became a subject of the King of England. But residence in an adopted country does not necessarily change the philosophy or the style of a poet.

Long before he decided to live abroad permanently, Eliot had developed a taste for classical literature. He was as familiar with European and Eastern writings as he was with the masterpieces of English. But the most crucial influence upon his early work came from the late-nineteenth-century French poets who, as a group, came to be known as the Symbolists. They saw poetry as an art of recreating states of mind and feeling, as opposed to reporting or confessing them. These beliefs became the basis of Eliot's own poetic methods. When people complained that this poetic method of suggestion was complex and difficult to understand, Eliot retorted that poetry had to be complex to express the complexities of modern life. Eliot and other American poets also believed that, divorced from British antecedents, they would once and for all bring the peculiar rhythms of their native speech into the mainstream of world literature. Eliot and these other poets are often referred to as Modernists.

Eliot had an austere view of poetic creativity; he disagreed with those who regarded a poem as a means of self-expression, as a source of comfort, or as a kind of spiritual pep talk. Practicing what he preached, Eliot startled his contemporaries in 1917 with the poems Portrait of a Lady, Prufrock and Other Observations. These early poems were dramatic studies of man's spiritual and emotional poverty in a barren world. Then, in 1922, with the editorial advice and encouragement of Ezra Pound, Eliot published The Waste Land, a long work which would become the most significant poem of the early twentieth century. The poem was so influential that the word “wasteland” entered common usage from Eliot's work. The word suggests a civilization that is spiritually empty and paralyzed by indecision and anxiety. The Waste Land proved that it was possible to write an epic poem of classical scope in the space of 434 lines. The poem contrasts the spiritual bankruptcy that Eliot saw as the dominant force in modern Europe with the values and unity that governed the past. Critics pored over the poem's complex structure and its dense network of allusions to world literature, Oriental religion, and anthropology. The impact of The Waste Land on other writers, critics, and the public was enormous, and it is regarded as one of the finest literary works ever written.

A few years after The Waste Land appeared Eliot published a series of notes identifying many of his key references. In 1925, Eliot published a kind of lyrical post-script to The Waste Land called The Hollow Men, which predicted in its somber conclusion that the world would not end with a bang but with a whimper. In The Hollow Men, Eliot repeats and expands some of the themes of his longer poem and arrives at that point of despair beyond which lie but two alternatives: renewal or annihilation. Critics, surveying Eliot's career, said that, after the spiritual dead-end of The Hollow Men, Eliot chose hope over despair and faith over the world-weary cynicism that marked his early years. But there is much evidence in his later poems to indicate that, for Eliot, hope and faith were not conscious choices. Instead, they were the consequences of a submission. After he became a British citizen and the member of the Church of England, radical changes in the focus of Eliot's writing, the exploration of religious themes became evident in his later poems Ash Wednesday (1930), with its deeply religious spiritual explorations, and Four Quartets, which contains the philosophical conclusions of a lifetime (though always tentative). These poems suggest that Eliot felt that religious belief could be a means of healing the wounds inflicted on a person by spiritually bankrupt society he depicted in The Waste Land. In such poetic dramas as Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail Party (1950), and The Confidential Clerk (1954), Pound affirmed a positive religious conviction that is sustaining.

Eliot spent the remainder of his poetic career in an extended meditation upon the limits of individual will and the limitless power of faith in the presence of grace.

Preludes

The winter evening settles down The morning comes to consciousness

With smell of steaks in passageways. Of faint stale smells of beer

Six o'clock From the sawdust-trampled street

The burnt-out ends of smoky days With all its muddy feet that press

And now a gusty shower wraps To early coffee-stands.

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet With the other masquerades

And newspapers from vacant lots; That time resumes,

The showers beat One thinks of all the hands

On broken blinds and chimney-pots, That are raising dingy shades

And at the corner of the street In a thousand furnished rooms.

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

You tossed a blanket from the bed, His soul stretched tight across the skies

You lay upon your back, and waited; That fade behind a city block,

You dozed, and watched the night revealing Or trampled by insistent feet

The thousand sordid images At four and five and six o'clock;

Of which your soul was constituted; And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

They flickered against the ceiling. And evening newspapers, and eyes

And when all the world came back Assured of certain certainties,

And the light crept up between the shutters, The conscience of a blackened street

And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, Impatient to assume the world.

You had such a vision of the street I am moved by fancies that are curled

As the street hardly understands; Around these images, and cling:

Sitting along the bed's edge, where The notion of some infinitely gentle

You curled the papers from your hair, Infinitely suffering things.

Or clasped the yellow soles of feet Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh;

In the palms of both soiled hands. The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Cited for his work as “a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry”, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In the decades that followed, he came frequently to the United States to lecture and to read his poems, sometimes to very large audiences.

Thomas Stearns Eliot's poetry received more critical acclaim than that of any other American poet of his time. Several of T.S. Eliot's plays had a successful run in London and New York.

Ezra Pound wrote a few final words on the death of his old friend, ending with this passage: “Am I to write `about' the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? Or my friend `the Possum'? Let him rest in peace, I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM.”

George Bernard Shaw

1856-1950

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a family of a civil servant. He was fifteen when he left school to become an office boy at a firm of land agents in Dublin. Being fond of the theatre he visited it from his earliest years and acquired so profound a knowledge of Shakespeare that he knew many of the plays by heart.

At the age of nineteen Shaw moved to England to spend his remaining 75 years there. In London B. Shaw had no intention of continuing office work and he spent a lot of time educating himself. He used to say: “Though almost penniless I had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture gallery in Trafalgar Square and another at Hampton Court without any servants to look after or rent to pay. I had the brains to use them.”

Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five long novels, such as Immaturity, Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in which he tackled the problems of marriage and showed himself as the fighter for family relations built on spiritual understanding free from social and class prejudices. Other works are An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron's Profession.

In the early eighties Shaw was deeply impressed by the increasing unemployment in London, being not far from poverty himself. At the British Museum reading room he read Karl Marx in a French version and “From that hour I became a man with some business in the world.” In 1884 B. Shaw joined the Fabian Society which based their activity on believing in slow development of different social reforms instead of revolutionary measures. He became one of the most famous public speakers, who was feared by every opponent for his sharp tongue and clear argument.

About this time Shaw was offered a job in the Pall Mall Gazette and in a short time he became one of the most popular critics of music, art and drama in London. He published several books of criticism on music and theatre, among them London Music, Music in London, Our Theatres in the Nineties. Nevertheless Shaw's attention was turned to the drama as a means of expressing the ideas crowding his mind. The long list of his plays opens with the cycle of Plays Unpleasant which marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama. This cycle includes Widower's Houses (1892), Philanderer (1893) and Mrs.Warren's Profession (1894). He protests against the evils of the society and the low position of a woman. He exposes such seamy sides of bourgeois society as poverty, sexual exploitation, marriage as a business deal, prostitution.

Widower's Houses. The first performance of B. Shaw's play Widower's Houses in 1892 was quite a sensation. Shaw was attacked both by the public and the critics who called him a cynic.

The theme was declared by Shaw to be “middleclass respectability fattening on the poverty of the slums as flies fatten on filth”. The play was a ruthless exposure of the darker sides of English life.

A respectable English gentleman Sartorius has made his fortune by renting tenement houses in the slum area. The houses are in a terrible state, but he refuses to spend any money on repairs. During the rest on the Rein he acquaints his daughter Blanche with a young doctor Harry Trench. They fall in love with each other and decide to marry. They return to England where Harry Trench pays a visit to Mr. Sartorius' house and is shocked at finding out that Sartorius's wealth has come from slum property. Trench offers Blanche to live on his income which he believes is derived in an honest way. However, Sartorius proves to Trench that the wealth of the latter comes from the same source, because the slums are located on the land that belongs to Trench and his aunt. The play reveals that the respectability of the rich rests on the money squeezed out of suffering and starving people.

Thus the start was made. He started by criticizing bourgeois morals and corruption. A year later he wrote the Philanderer and a few months later another satire Mrs. Warren's Profession, all the three being “plays unpleasant”, because he was telling the truth to the bourgeois readers and spectators.

Mrs. Warren's Profession. Mrs. Warren is a proprietress of several brothels in Belgium, Vienne, Budapest and she profits greatly from them. She considers her business quite honest and noble. She is able to give her daughter Vivie a decent education at private school and then at the university. Her daughter does not suspect what the source of her mother's income is. When she becomes aware of this her first impulse was to protest against it. It seemed that Bernard Shaw's intention was to portray a new character who due to her energy would try to change things in the bourgeois society. But it didn't happen. Her mother told the story of life of three sisters: one of them, got poisoned by lead at the factory and died, another married a worker and kept the house and three children for 16 shillings a week till her husband deteriorated through heavy drinking. “Was it worthy to keep straight for the sake of it?” she asks her daughter. Then she told her daughter about her work as a scullery maid until she and her sister Lizz opened a brothel. It was a first-rate brothel and the girls were treated miles better than she was treated working as a scullery maid. Little by little her daughter begins to take mother's side. “You were right if taken from practical point of view”, she said. “And from all others”, was Mrs. Warren's answer. She said that marriage did not settle the question, so the best way was to chase a bachelor, marry him and live on his money. Prostitution is tackled by Shaw as the social evil and he severely criticizes it. No wonder that the play did not see the stage until 1902.

The first cycle was followed by another one which he called now Plays Pleasant. There appeared Arms and the Man (“The Chocolate Soldier”), The Man of Destiny, and Candida.

The title of the cycle is rather ironical: through the amusing situations and witty scenes with sparkling dialogues B. Shaw continues his criticism of bourgeois morals and ideals. He attacks militarism and war, their senselessness and cruelty, ridicules war and the so-called glories of war (Arms and the Man, 1894). This is a story of a man who gives up military service, the war and the arms entirely for a woman's society. Edward VII, then a would-be king, Prince of Wales said that the author of the play must be a fool. Shaw dethroned Napoleon in The Man of Destiny. The main attention of the author is paid to the problem of morality. He calls upon the people to unmask, to free themselves from prejudices and illusions. Then followed Candida, the comic play You Never Can Tell, and the equally comic Androcles and the Lion. The third cycle of plays of B. Shaw Three Plays for the Puritans includes: The Devil's Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899). The title of the third cycle has a double meaning: on the one hand the plays turn against English Puritanism, bigotry and hypocrisy, on the other hand they are directed against the decadent drama. He contrasts his plays for puritans to those where the main themes tackled are love and marriage. Shaw explains that the greatest evil is to replace intellectual life by love intrigues.

By 1900 Shaw had established his reputation as a playwright. He wrote one play after another as well as books of criticism and pamphlets on socialism. B. Shaw's plays were not merely plays of dramatic action. Their tension was created by the struggle of ideas; they always set out to solve some social, moral or philosophical problems. In his more than fifty plays, in their numerous prefaces, Shaw has treated almost every public and social theme of the century.

Shaw made a revolution in the theatre of his time. Shaw's plays deal with various problems: politics, science, religion, education and economics. And in solving them he criticizes the vices of capitalist society laying bare its gross injustice and showing its inhumanity.

B. Shaw also revived the practice of including a long preface and sometimes a sequel in the published version, explaining what the play was about and what he actually meant. He gained a reputation as a man of brilliant wit, making frequent and effective use of the paradox, which can be found in dramatic structure, characters and style. Shaw uses them not merely for the sake of witty play of words, but to turn inside out the moral and social truths of the bourgeois world.

During World War I Shaw wrote long and daring articles, protesting against the imperialist governments and their war policy. In his article “Common Sense about the War” he said: “No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather the harvest in the villages and make a revolution in the towns.”

Shaw was greatly interested in Russian culture. He highly appreciated and admired L. Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and also Chekhov and Gorky.

B. Shaw was at was at the peak of his fame (1925) when he received the International Nobel Prize for Literature.

In spite of the fact that he called himself a socialist, Shaw was at times incredibly contemptuous of the working class and thought it incapable of ever playing a significant role in winning socialism. He never fully understood Marxism. Shaw saw and felt the class contradictions of the new imperialist era very sharp and intense and in his analysis of the political and economic basis of imperialism he went much farther than his predecessors, the mid-nineteenth century writers. Shaw's aim was to show real life, not to write plays for entertainment with a “happy end”. He opposed the so called “well-made play trend” - which was very popular among the playwrights of his time.

The list of Shaw's plays is very vast; to his most popular plays also belong Pygmalion (1912), The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House (1917), Major Barbara, Saint Joan.

Heartbreak House was written during World War I. Shaw himself highly appreciated the play and in the preface to it he disclosed the symbolic meaning of the title. In the subtitle he called the play “fantasia in the Russian manner on the English theme”. The dramatic pattern of the play is Chekhovian; a group of people in a country house, the collision of their conflicting ideas and their impact on each other.

Shaw sympathized with these people for their culture, sincerity, disgust for business, and at the same time accused them of idleness, of hatred for politics, of being helpless wasters of their inheritance. The author indicated the futility of the life of bourgeois intelligentsia.

Pygmalion. The main hero of this play, Professor Henry Higgins, is presented rather ironically, as a kind of modern Pygmalion. (Pygmalion, a celebrated sculptor of mythological antiquity and King of Cyprus, fell in love with a statue of Galatea which he had made of ivory, and at his prayer Aphrodite had given life to it. Pygmalion is often accepted as a symbol of the power to breathe life and soul into inanimate things).

In actual fact the satire implied in the play is directed against Professor Henry Sweet, a well-known English philologist and phonetician. There are touches of Sweet's character in the play, but Henry Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.

Professor Higgins meets Eliza one stormy night selling flowers to a crowd under the portico of St. Paul's Cathedral. The professor, struck by her remarkably pure Cockney pronunciation is making notes of her words with a view of studying them at home. A gentleman seems particularly interested in Higgins, and the conversation, which springs up between them reveals that he is Colonel Pickering, a student of Indian dialects. He and Higgins, it appears, have been interested in each other's work for years. Higgins points out that he can perfect the girl's shocking pronunciation which keeps her selling flowers in the street and prevents her from getting a respectable position as a saleslady in a flower shop.

The remark has made a deep impression on Eliza and the very next day she visits the professor to take lessons in pronunciation, at a price she considers fully sufficient of one shilling an hour. Finding Eliza's offer very interesting professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering make a bet, that in six months Higgins will teach Eliza the language of “Shakespeare and Milton” and pass her off as a duchess at an ambassador's party. If Higgins succeeded Pickering would pay the expenses of the experiment.

Eliza is taken into Higgins' house where during several months she is being taught to speak correct English. While staying at Higgins' home Eliza gets accustomed to Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. Higgins is not married and lives alone with his servants and his elderly housekeeper. He often finds Eliza amusing and Eliza, grateful for the education he is giving her, makes herself useful to him wherever she can. In order to prove his experiment Higgins dresses Eliza in beautiful clothes and takes her to the Ambassador's Garden Party where she meets the “cream” of society. Everybody takes her for a grand lady.

Higgins wins his bet. But he has forgotten that a flower-girl is a human being with mind and heart. He looks upon her only as a thing. He does not care what is to become of her when he has finished his instruction. He says, “When I've done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter, and then it will be her own business again.” Higgins is not unkind by nature and perhaps he has even grown fond of Eliza without knowing it; but what is an ignorant flower-girl to a gentleman of means and wide education... Eliza teaches him how wrong he is, giving him a lesson of feeling. The lesson costs her some pain because not only has she got accustomed to Higgins, but has also begun to love him.

B. Shaw's play Pygmalion is a satire on higher society. Here aristocrats are opposed to a simple girl. At the very beginning of this comedy Shaw stresses the difference between the speech of educated people and that of the ignorant people (the Cockney speech).

In his preface to Pygmalion Shaw wrote: “The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants and not all of them - have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him. The reformer we need most today is an energetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.”

Herbert George Wells

1866-1946

H.G. Wells was born at Bromley, Kent, in a lower middle-class family. His father was a professional cricket player and his mother was a house keeper in a large country house. He studied at Midhurst Grammar School, combining his studying with the work at a draper's, then as a chemist's apprentice. Being a bright boy he won a scholarship of the Royal College of Science in London. After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree with honours at London University Wells took to teaching as a private tutor in biology, and even wrote a text-book on biology.

In 1893 he turned to journalism and literature contributing to the Saturday Review and the Pall Mall Gazette.

Like his whole literary heritage Wells' novels may be divided into three groups: 1. The social-political science fiction novels of his early years, where he put his scientific knowledge to literary use in a series of semi scientific novels prognostic of the future (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, etc.). 2. The realistic novels of his great fiction period, which were as great an influence on the generation of that era as were the plays by Ibsen and Shaw (Marriage, Ann Veronica, Tono Bungay). 3. The novels and books of his latest period, vehicles for his political theories (The Shape of Things to Come, The Open Conspiracy, The Outline of History).

Being greatly influenced by the outstanding achievements of such celebrated scientists of his day as Faraday, Rontgen and Darwin, Wells begins to explore in his works the new world opened up by modern science. His books show not only the ability to make science the matter of a story, but a rare gift of scientific imagination, which makes the most extravagant happenings appear plausible.

Wells' science-fiction novels are always built on a sound scientific basis. All of them are based on real scientific discoveries and hypotheses. So the chemical decolouring of tissue and the discovery of x-rays prompted Wells to write The Invisible Man. Wells tried his best to make his fantasies convincing. For this reason he would give accurate descriptions of non-existing machines, cite fictitious newspapers articles and scientific reports.

Some of his works show his scientific foresight. For instance in the novel The War in the Air (1908) Wells describes war planes which were first used during World War I. In the novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) Wells writes about A-bombs and their radioactive effect 30 years before their invention. These predictions testify to the author's imagination and profound scientific knowledge.

The originality of Wells' science-fiction novels lies in their social problems. Retaining their scientific value his stories and novels often acquire the characteristic features of social utopia or satire. The main trait of Wells' creative work is his concern for the fate of mankind.

Thus in The Time Machine (1895) the theme of an unusual scientific invention - a machine capable of travelling through time - is interwoven with the theme of class struggle, class antagonism leading to the degeneration of mankind. The author describes a fantastic machine made of nickel, ivory and crystal and with great artistic mastery depicts the flight through time when days and nights seem like the flapping of a black wing and the sun and the moon become streaks of fire in the sky. However, it is not the main theme in the story. The principal idea of the book is the contrast of the two degenerated races - the Eloi and the Morlocks into which mankind has been divided. Having reached the year 802701, the Time Traveller meets the Eloi - beautiful and graceful, but utterly helpless creatures who live in dilapidated buildings surrounded by neglected gardens. They are the descendants of the ruling classes, the product of luxurious life and aversion for; work. The other race, the horrible and pale Morlocks, who live in the underground caverns resemble animals. The Morlocks are the descendants of workers who had lived in the dark underground factories many years before. Out of habit, they continue working for the Eloi, they provide them with clothes and food, but hunt the Eloi at night and feed on their meat. The more remote future visited by the Time Traveller is even grimmer. He sees a desert land of monster crabs creeping out of the sea.

In The Time Machine one can feel Wells' pessimism. The writer does not see any ways of saving mankind from war and moral degradation. Wells thought the working class was too ignorant to fight for its happiness. This idea gave birth to the horrible figures of the Morlocks. Despite his pessimism Wells hoped that mankind would be able to escape degeneration and build life on more rational basis. The dreadful scenes depicted by the author serve as a warning to mankind, an appeal to give up exploitation and violence.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897) treat another theme, very characteristic of Wells - the loneliness of the scientist in the bourgeois world and the danger of science in the hands of individualists. For all his respect for science and scientists, Wells understood that science might become a destructive force if put in the hands of mercenary people and egoists. Wells does not approve of “superman”, an ideal of the bourgeoisie, created by Nietzsche. A superman indifferent to good and evil, coming to power through crime is shown by Wells as a miserable maniac, doomed to death. Such a superman is Doctor Moreau - a talented surgeon. Persecuted by hypocrites he flees to a desert island and continues experimenting on animals turning them into strange humanlike creatures. He does it for two purposes: to surround himself by obedient creatures who look upon him as God and to revenge upon the hateful world of human beings, creating a parody of mankind. The world of Doctor Moreau is horrible and hopeless and its creator and master - lonely and unhappy, in the end being killed by the humanlike creatures of his own making. Elements of social satire are apparent in this novel. Like the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels those half people, half beasts, remind of some people of the bourgeoisie. Their cruelty is combined with cowardice and hypocrisy. A man who accidentally finds himself on the island of Doctor Moreau and later returns to England is disappointed to see the same society of brutes among the civilized Englishmen.

The novel The Invisible Man deals with a similar theme - the tragic loneliness of a bourgeois scientist resulting in moral degradation. The action is set in a small town in the south of England. The talented physicist Griffin who becomes invisible having discovered the secret of the discolouring of tissue perishes struggling against the conservative world of Philistines. He turns into a savage and commits horrible crimes. A great scientist becomes a dangerous maniac and murderer.

Wells' great period as a novelist began about 1905 with Kipps. Here at last he discovered something he had never possessed before - humour mixed with tender sympathy. He began to deal with the world he knew instead of the world he dreamt about.

Wells' next bid for fame was as an historian and sociologist. His work The Outline of History (1920) issued in 2 volumes was an attempt to write the historical section of the World Encyclopedia which was Wells' dream. This work provides a thorough analysis of different historical events and induces to think of history as a process of logical connections on a world scale.

Wells keenly felt the contradictions tearing apart English bourgeois society and was interested in social reforms by means of which he wanted to help people achieve better life. However, he was carried away by Fabian ideas. He did not understand the role of the proletariat and dreamed about talented intellectuals who should start a gradual reforming of the world. Wells hoped that some capitalists would finance them. His future world was that of an improved World Capitalist system.

William Somerset Maugham

1874-1965

William Somerset Maugham is one of the best known writers of the present day. He was not only a novelist of considerable rank, but also one of the most successful dramatists and short-story writers.

W. S. Maugham was born in Paris, where his father was a solicitor for the British Embassy. His mother died when he was eight. Two years later the father followed, and the orphan child was sent to his paternal uncle, a clergyman in Whitetable, Kent. What he experienced in that cold and rigid environment he has told in Of Human Bondage, which except for its ending is almost entirely autobiographical. At thirteen he was sent to King's School, Canterbury, with an intention that he should proceed to Oxford and prepare to enter the church.

But he had always wanted to write and finally secured his uncle's permission to go to Heidelberg University. According to his uncle's will he had to choose a profession and he chose medicine, thus entering St. Thomas Hospital in London in 1892. In 1898 he attained his medical degree, but he never practiced, except for a brief period in the Lambeth slums as an internist. “In those six years I must have witnessed pretty well every emotion of which man is capable. It appealed to my dramatic instinct. It excited the novelist in me. I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief. I saw dark lines that despair drew on a face.” This experience resulted in writing the first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897). He then visited Italy and France, where he settled down in Paris. His talent for fiction, however, had little success and he tried his hand at playwriting. His luck turned only in 1907, with his first successful play Lady Frederick. In the succeeding years he produced plays which made him both famous and prosperous.

Several times he went on round the world trips, and spent long periods in the USA, the South Seas, China and Russia. During World War I he enlisted with a Red Cross Ambulance Unit. Later, however, he was transferred to the Intelligence Service (Secret Service) and was sent to Russia to prevent the Bolsheviks from coming to power in Russia and prevent the change of the government.

Early in the 1930's Maugham settled down near Paris. At the outbreak of World War II he was assigned to special work at the British Ministry of Information in Paris. The Nazi advance overtook him there; he managed, however, to reach England, leaving behind him all his belongings and many of his unfinished manuscripts. In the years following he settled down in England.

Of Human Bondage (1915) is considered to be his masterpiece. It is clearly based on the author's personal experience, but the novel should not be regarded as autobiographical. This is a story about Philip Carey, brought up by his uncle, a vicar. He prayed much and believed in the omnipotence of God. This was the first bondage he experienced in life - religious bondage. Being lame he experienced physical bondage which in a way isolated him from others. He studied art for two years but he realized that his wish to become a real artist would never come true. Philip left Paris to become a medical student. His love affair with Mildred, a waitress in a tea shop, brought him financial difficulties and he left his medical service. The reality which was offered him differed terribly from the ideal of his dream. He experiences other bondages - cruelty, unhappiness, grief and pain, both physical and moral. They all are the consequences of the unjust social system.

Cakes and Ale (1930) - was claimed by Maugham himself to be the best of his books. It represents the backstage life of literary profession. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) deals with the life of a painter.

He possessed a keen and observant eye and in his best works he ridiculed philistinism, narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, snobbery, money worship, pretence, self-interest, etc. His acid irony and brilliant style helped him win a huge audience of readers.

W. S. Maugham, a highly prolific novelist and playwright, has left a legacy of novels, novelettes, short stories, essays and over 20 plays. Maugham's other chief works include: novels - The Painted Veil (1925), The Narrow Corner (1932), The Razor's Edge (1944); plays: The Circle (1921), Caesar's Wife (1922), The Constant Wife (1927), The Sacred Flame (1929).

Maugham's short stories are based on his numerous travels in the South-East of Asia. There are a great many collections of stories to his credit: The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), On a Chinese Screen (1925), The Casuarina Tree (1926), Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931), A King (1933), Cosmopolitans (1936), Creatures of Circumstances (1947) and others.

The Moon and Sixpence. The novel which has rather an unusual plot is partly based on the life story of the famous French painter Gauguin, who being an innovator and rebel in art wanted to do away with the conventionalism in bourgeois art.

Charles Strickland, a London stockbroker of middle age, who gets obsessed by an irresistible desire to express himself in painting, abandons his business career and his wife. He leaves London for Paris, where he devotes himself to painting. Although none of his paintings are appreciated in Paris and he is almost starving, his decision to paint is irrevocable. The only person who understands Strickland's creative genius is the painter Dirk Stroeve. Trying to save Strickland from a terrible disease and starvation, Dirk Stroeve brings him home where he sacrifices his time, his comfort and his money for Strickland. But instead of gratitude Strickland shows his callousness and inhumanity towards Dirk Stroeve. He seduces Stroeve's wife Blanche who falls in love with him. When the latter takes no more interest in her, she commits suicide.

Thus after years of resultless struggle in Paris Strickland moves to Marseilles. He spends about four months at Marseilles where he finds it impossible to earn the small sum he needs to keep body and soul together. His imagination being haunted for a long time by “an island all green and sunny, encircled by sea more blue than is found in the Northern latitude”, he decides to go to the South Seas. By a chance of luck he boards a ship bound for Australia, where he works as a stoker thus getting to Tahiti. There he marries a Polynesian woman Ata and devotes the rest of his life to painting. Strickland dies of leprosy. According to his will his wife burns their house the walls of which had been covered from ceiling to floor with elaborate compositions by Strickland. Everything had been burnt and only on discovering some canvases Strickland had once carelessly tossed aside during his years of unrewarded work, does the world of art realize it has lost a genius.