British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art sbows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Chapter VIII

EDWARDIAN LITERATURE

After the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Edward VII reigned until 1910, and the years before World War I were the last years of the old way of life to be changed for ever after 1914. This Edwardian period was rich in novelists, such as Kipling, Conrad, Wells. Ford Madox Ford, a wellknown writer of that period, wrote: “The novel has become indispensable to the understanding of life … the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives”. Poetry was represented by Yeats. In the theatre Galsworthy, Shaw and Barry were the chief writers. In the manner of writing some of them were close to late Victorians while others started experimenting with forms. In fact, it is difficult to classify them from the chronological point of view, some of them, like Shaw, lived a very long life. But England reflected in their works of that period is reflected as an empire in the process of acknowledging that though the progress and social changes are vital, they can also be uncontrollable and destructive. One of such writers is Kipling.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was Stevenson’s disciple and successor. Henry James called him an “English Balzac” and “a finished man of genius”. Kipling was a neo-romantic. He achieved literary celebrity after the

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publication of many of his poems in 1889. Later these poems were collected as Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which became the most popular book of verse in the English-speaking world for the next forty years. The poet enters into the soldiers’ feelings and describes in their own language the hardships they have to endure for the grandeur of the Empire. The poems are didactic and Kipling widely uses parables, Biblical symbols. He invented his own style of combining the refrains with the orator’s speech in order to show the necessity of absolute order, discipline and submission. Speech characteristics are very important. For that he uses grammatical, lexical and even phonetic devices. Aitch-dropping, characteristic for London cockney, is one of such examples: be’old (behold), ‘er (her), ‘bout (about). Vernacular is also rendered through grammar: the use of double negation (you won’t need nothing); the use of third-person pronouns instead of the definite article (in them days, them walls); the violation of verbal paradigm (we gives you, he comed), etc. The use of profanities, characteristic for the army, was forbidden in print at that time, so Kipling used euphemisms: “bleedy” or “blooming” instead of “bloody”. His well-known poem Boots is a typical example:

We’re foot – slog – slog – slog – sloggin’ over Africa – Foot – foot – foot – foot – sloggin’ over Africa –

(Boots – boots – boots – boots, movin’ up an’ down again!) There is no discharge in the war!

In his verse Kipling was able to combine both high and low traditions: romantic ballad, rude songs, elaborate poetry of Pre-Raphaelites and folklore. He also mixed up real and imagery geographic names to create his own world. His other well-known collection of poetry is Departmental Ditties.

While Kipling was able to identify himself with a humble British soldier, an Indian peasant or a colonial officer he nevertheless admired action, power and efficiency, and, from time to time, tended to crude chauvinism. His poem Recessional, written for Jubellee Day of Queen Victoria in 1897, was acclaimed for catching the mood of the moment, but the mood changed, and he was increasingly accused of vulgarity and jigoism in aesthetic and anti-imperialist circles.

Like Stevenson he is a master of both the short story and the short poem. His stories reconcile barracks and art and the language of them is perfect. Kipling is at his best in works for children, such as The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902) and others, where reactionary politics interferes least with his narrative and descriptive art. The Jungle Book is in fact an epic description of the world of animals, rooted in oral tradition,

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when people believed that animals were their ancestors. The romantic tradition can be observed in the unity of Man and Nature. Many critics call this book a bestiary. In Just So Stories Kipling moves away from this genre; his animals do not symbolize particular human traits but acquire their own traits of character. The book is much influenced by Indian folk tales. Two other collections – Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies – are about Merry Old England. In these books the writer emphasizes the similarity between the present and the past and the main issue is the continuity of life and succession of generations.

Kipling’s novel The Light that Failed (1890) presents the author’s own conception of art. In his opinion an artist has no right to lie, his works must be true to life. The protagonist Dick Heldar is a personification of “a real man”: proud, loyal, brave; he likes danger and adventures, thinks that he must not submit to common rules, but can dictate his own “rules of the game”.

The novel Kim (1901) presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, superstitions, the life of the bazaars and the road. It has the elements of a picaresque novel. Its hero, Kimball O’Hara, travels with an old Buddist lama as his pupil, being a secret service agent at the same time. He saves the lama’s life, and the lama gives Kim moral lessons. Kim resembles Mowgli from The Jungle Book because he is also able to adapt to the habits of another society, to belong to it without loosing his own individuality.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born of Polish parents in Ukraine. His real name is Teodor Joseph Konrad Korzeniowski. In 1886 he became a British subject and a master mariner. Sea became the setting for many of his novels. His artistic credo was “to reveal the substance of the truth of life”. Two of his most known novels – Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness - are narrated on behalf of Marlow, who provides a commentary on the action in the manner of Greek Chorus in the plays. The narrative technique is characterized by a skilful use of breaks in time sequence. The movement of the stories, of the images and emotions is portrayed through each character’s private vision of reality. So Conrad acts as an Impressionist. The main issue of these two novels is moral values. The novel Nostromo is about human corruption and vulnerability. The novel Chance is about the romantic love of Flora de Barral, the lonely daughter of a crooked financier. The action of the novel is combined with the attractions of the sea background.

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Herbert Wells (1866–1946) burst on the literary scene with The Time Machine, a social allegory set in the year 802701, describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent middle class, Eloi, which inhabits the idyllic surface. It was one of the first English novels in the new genre of science fiction – literature about the imaginary marvels or disasters, created by scientific and technological discoveries or inventions of the future. The Invisible Man is one of his most known novels. It is about a man who discovers how to become invisible. Social, moral and scientific preoccupations are reworked out with symbolic suggestiveness in this novel. Such articles as

Anticipations, The Discovery of the Future, A Modern Utopia showed him as a social and political prophet. In the novel War in the Air he predicted World War I. The World Set Free is a prophecy about the invention of the atomic bomb. Wells was also a perfect satirist. The novel Kipps, a sardonic variation of Great Expectations, was called by James “the first intelligently and consistently ironic or satiric novel, free of the sentimental interference”. Tono-Bungay is a panoramic critic of Edwardian plutocracy and raises the problem of dualism. Wells shows how Edward’s swaggering career after his invention of a patent medicine parallels his puritanical nephew George’s growing experience of social and moral disillusionment. The novel ends with a symbolic vision of the passing of traditional England as seen from the bridge of a naval destroyer. Herbert Wells contributed to the development of the novel of ideas – a novel, which raises and discusses some important issues.

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was a close friend of Joseph Conrad. In his art he recognized his debt to Tolstoy and Turgenev. He considered Turgenev to be the subtlest poet who ever wrote prose, and placed Tolstoy next to Shakespeare. Their humane realism put an imprint on all his works. In 1916 he wrote an article A Russian and an Englishman in which he praised sincerity of the Russian literature, the combination of humanism and social criticism in it, subtle psychological analysis and recognized its influence upon his writings.

Of course, his main work is The Forsyte Saga. Before Galsworthy started to work on it he published the novel Villa Rubein in 1900 in which we can find the first mentioning of Jolyon Forsyte as Trefry’s companion. The story The Salvation of a Forsyte about Swithin Forsyte appeared in 1901, and in the play The Civilized (1903) the Forsytes became the protagonists. Although respected in literary circles for the perfection of his form and style, Galsworthy did not command a wider audience until 1906;

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in that year he published The Man of Property, the first novel of The Forsyte Saga, his most famous book which traces the fortunes of the Forsyte family. The title of the first novel is symbolic, as the titles of other novels, which comprise The Saga. The main theme is property, all the Forsytes produce nothing, but try to grab everything. Galsworthy shows himself as a satirist when he writes that “death is unimaginable for them, as they cannot take it with them”. Art is also alien to the Forsytes, for example, they admire little Francis, because her musical pieces give her money, but they do not like her sonata, as she cannot make money on it. The central figure is The Man of Property – Soames Forsyte, whose sole aim in life is accumulation and preservation of property. Soames epitomizes both the shrewd entrepreneurial virtue and the hypocrisies of late Victorian bourgeois society. Galsworthy manages to hold the balance between opposed ideas or between characters with opposite tendencies.

The other main theme of The Saga is the decline of the Victorian epoch, its values and stability. Old Dorset, the founder of the Forsyte clan, had 10% income and 10 children, at the end of the century both income and the number of children decreased. The funeral of Victoria symbolizes the end of the age; the death of Timothy – the end of the Forsytes.

The book is an omniscient narration (improper direct speech). The narrator describes a story as if capable of seeing every event that concerns the characters, even their inner thoughts and motives. This device deepens the lyricism of the novel. Landscape overshadows the feelings. Galsworthy also uses parallel characters, Soames and Irene, for example, and it reminds us of Leo Tolstoy’s Karenin and Anna. Repetition of characteristic features deepens the readers’ impression. In the writer’s attention to a detail (his description of furniture, jewelry, etc.) the readers can feel the influence of Dickens. In the next books of The Saga Galsworthy writes about the next generation of the Forsytes as opposed to the older one.

As a dramatist, John Galsworthy based his plays on contemporary social problems. His success with the audience in the theatre began with The Silver Box, performed in 1906. The play is about theft and in it he employed his favourite device of “parallel families” – one rich, one poor. There followed Strife – an examination of men and managers in industry, and Justice, directed against the practice of solitary confinement. His success continued in his later plays, including Loyalties. Nowadays his plays collapsed in public esteem, though he remains as one of the best English novelists of the XX century due to his famous succession of the Forsyte novels, an epic of bourgeois life.

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In theatre all else must take the second place to the achievement of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). His career was the longest in English dramatic history, beginning with Widowers’ Houses (1892). In 1949, when Shaw was ninety-three, Buoyant Billions was performed at the Malvern Festival. This festival was closely connected with his name and work of that period.

In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society. It was the society of Socialists who opposed immediate revolutionary action. He quickly became a spokesman for it and in the same year wrote A Manifesto, in which he expressed the aims of the Fabian Society, edited the magazine Fabian Essays in Socialism. Throughout his long life Bernard Shaw wrote over 50 plays, almost all of them have lengthy prefaces, in which he expressed his views as a non-romantic and a champion of the thinking men.

His intellectual equipment was far greater than that of any of his contemporaries. He alone could understand the greatness of Ibsen who managed to introduce social realism into theatrical art, and he was determined that his own plays should also be a vehicle for ideas. In 1891 Shaw wrote his famous article, The Quintessence of Ibsentism, about Ibsen’s new attitudes to drama, his creation of modern prose drama – tragedies about ordinary people in prose, discarding of traditional stage effects. But his temperament had nothing of Ibsen's grimes. If he saw, with unusual clarity, the ills of the world, he possessed a wonderful capacity for jest and a verbal wit equal to that of Oscar Wilde. His paradoxes, like “It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid” or “England and America are two countries divided by a common language” gave the rise to the term “Shavian wit”. He created the paradoxical drama, revealing a meaning or truth behind the superficial absurdity. His wit, often verging on Dickensian caricature, remained undiminished throughout his career. He was often accused of frivolity and emotional superficiality, but his own view was that, by provoking laughter, he could ensure his audience’s attention while demolishing their moral and social preconceptions. His artistic method lies in the combination of Ibsen’s principles with the declaration of the debt to old stage traditions. Shaw was also deeply impressed by the plays of Chekhov. When he saw the Cherry Orchard, while writing Heartbreak House, he said: “I feel as if I want to tear up all my plays and begin over again”.

The playwright worked in different genres, typical for the XIX century commercial theatre: melodrama (The Devil’s Disciple), large-scale historical drama (Anthony and Cleopatra), domestic drama (Candida), romantic comedy (Man and Superman), but he could turn these plays into

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significant social canvasses. They also show how closely he studied every detail of theatrical workmanship. In the early plays his originality as a playwright lay largely in the conception of character. He would take a conventional stage type, reverse it, and then prove that the reversal was the truth, Thus, in Arms and the Man, for the romantic stage soldier he substitutes the mercenary, who knows fear and hunger; in Mrs. Warren's Profession he replaces the romantic courtesan with the woman who is conducting the profitable but unpleasant trade of prostitution. Also, he allowed his characters to speak all of what was in their minds, however disconcerting it might be.

This reversal of the ordinary conception of character has remained the most consistent feature of his satirical comedy, and he employed it in plays from Caesar and Cleopatra to St. Joan. In the latter Shaw concentrates himself on the issues of the Protestant conscience and the rise of nationalism, seeing these as the central issues which the career of Joan brought into focus. It is interesting to note that by the end of the play Shaw has shown how such brutal acts as Joan’s burning can be brought about by men who are not villains, but men of fine conscience and dedicated religion:” It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us”, – writes the author in the Preface (his prefaces, at their best, are masterpieces of argument).

In the play Widower’s Houses Ibsen’s influence is evident; the subtitle “unpleasant play” reflects Shaw’s sense of its allegiance to the new theatrical movement. It is also a remodelling of the conventions of domestic melodrama and romantic comedy (in the sense that a young couple after a stretch of difficulties are eventually happily reunited. It shows the manner in which the capitalist system corrupts human behaviour and relationship.

Another theme that appears in many of Shaw’s plays is that of “The Life Force”. Its essence is that a current of creative evolution activated by the power of human will is essential to human progress, and war, decease and the present brevity of human life-span frustrate the Life Force. Shaw’s ideas of Creative Evolution are reflected in the play Man and Superman, which raises the Don Juan theme in a paradoxical way. The protagonist Jack Tanner, who is bent on pursuing his own spiritual development, personifies Don Juan. He tries to flee from the marital pursuit of Ann Whitefield, but in the end ruefully allows himself to be captured in marriage by her upon recognizing that she, being a woman, is a powerful instrument of “The Life Force” since the destiny of the human race lies in her and other women’s reproductive capacity. The last act of this play is not realistic

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and presents the meeting of Don Juan and The Devil during which the latter speaks out Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman, who is to create his own morality. Shaw uses the play to give us the idea of The Life Force, which is striving for perfection, so Man must work in this direction to be a Superman.

Shaw left no school of playwrights, but nevertheless modern drama is indebted to him in many ways due to his development of drama of moral passion, intellectual conflict and debate, his reviving the comedy of manners and venturing into symbolic farce.

William Butler Yeats (1805–1939) is not only a poet. He contributed a great deal to the revival of the Irish national theatre. In his plays he also widely uses images and symbols. His best known plays are Cathleen Ni Hoolihan (1902), where the Poor Old Woman symbolizes the wrongs of Ireland, and Deidre (1907), based on Celtic mythology. In poetry Yeats belonged to Imagism – the first of numerous movements associated with Anglo-American poetic Modernism and characterized by clarity, precision and disciplined freedom of the form. Yeats draws his imagery from remote spheres, including, for instance, oriental art and mythology. The influence of Japaneese forms (tanka – a lyric form, consisting of 31 syllables in lines of 5/7/5/7/7 syllables and haiku – a lyric form consisting of 17 syllables used in three lines: 5/7/5) is obvious in his poetry as in the poetry of other Imagists. His earlier poetry is an endeavour to get away from his age and withdraw into a self-created world of loveliness, far away from the world of cold calculation and rational impulses. The poet dreams of the glorious solitude of the world of stars – his favourite symbol:

Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;

Remember the wisdom out of the old days:

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,

And the winds that blow through the starry ways,

Let the starry winds, and the flame, and the flood

Cover over and hide, for he has no part

With the lonely, majestical multitude.

In the later period Yeats’ manner became harder, more sophisticated. In a way Yeats’ poetry may be said to form a living link between two epochs.

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Tasks

1.What are the main tendencies in the development of Edwardian prose: themes, ideas, conflicts, artistic devices. Its main representatives. Analyze one of the novels of Conrad or Wells.

2.What are the themes of Kipling’s prose. Analyze one of his novels or stories.

3.What do Kipling’s Just So Stories and The Jungle Books have in common and how do they differ?

4.Read Kipling’s poem If – and the variants of its translation. Analyze them. Which one do you prefer and why? What is the moral credo of the author?

IF –

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you.

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies.

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken.

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!“

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

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If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run. Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And – which is more – you'll be a Man, my son!

БУДЬ В СИЛАХ ТЫ...

Будь в силах ты рассудка не лишиться, Безумцами в безумье обвинен; Отвергнутый, в себе не усомниться, Но вдуматься, за что ты оскорблен;

Будь в силах ждать – и ждать, не уставая, – Будь в силах не бороться с клеветой, Терпеть вражду, вражды не разжигая, – И все ж не слыть ни трусом, ни ханжой;

Будь в силах ты мечтать – о достижимом, Будь в силах грезить – не смыкая глаз, Будь в силах пребывать невозмутимым

В свой славный час и в свой бесславный час; Будь в силах зреть, как истиной, открытой Тобою, дураков морочит плут И дело жизни всей твоей разбито, –

И, в этот прах склонясь, продолжить труд;

Будь в силах ты всем, скопленным помалу, Рискнуть ва-банк за карточным столом, И проиграть, и все начать сначала, Не пожалев ни разу ни о чем;

Будь в силах не пускать в отставку тело, Когда оно отслужит полный срок, Будь в силах, если сердце ослабело, Одною волей гнать по жилам ток;

Будь в силах ты не важничать с толпою И не теряться в обществе князей, Будь не раним ни дружбой, ни враждою,

Ум в каждом чти – и все ж не чти ничей, Будь в силах ты всю жизнь лететь стрелою

Ивсе же – на мгновенья мерить век, – Тогда твои – Земля и все Земное,

Иглавное, мой сын, ты – Человек!

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