A Reassessment of John Galsworthy

76 works of such critics as Geoffrey Hartman, Georg Lukacs, Lucien Goldman, Raymond Williams, and Michel Foucault. In another essay, Raymond Schwab supplies the prototype of the critic who clarifies the coincidence of the advent of Romanticism and Orientalism in the West and personifies Said's critical interest in the world. And the last essay, "Islam, Philology, and French Culture: Renan and Masslgnon," provides insights into the interrelationships between criticism and history, between textuality and culture, thus producing a suitable conclusion for Said's book. This wide-ranging work "goes beyond," or transcends, other contemporary literary theory. Said shows how critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault, for example, and by influences like Marxism, linguistics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. His revelation of the crippling effect of the various methods and schools is offset by his advocacy of freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to the political, social, and human values, and to the heterogeneity of human experience. In fact, Said provides such a subtle but powerful new meaning for the practice of criticism in modern society that a few cavils with his work are not worth mentioning here. Instead, the intellectual excitement of each essay and the general enlightening effect of the brilliant thinking and writing of the book as a whole move the reader to the recognition of Said's major contribution to contemporary literary critical theory and practice. Bruce E. Teets, Emeritus Central Washington University 7. A REASSESSMENT OF JOHN GALSWORTHY Alec Fréchet: John Galsworthy, l'Homme, le Romancier, le Critique Social (The Man, the Novelist, the Social Critic). Paris: Klincksieck, 1979. In English, John Galsworthy: A Reassessment, trans. Denis Mahaffey. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982. $27.50 John Galsworthy, Nobel prize winner in 1932, died just fifty years ago. He was the victim of relative oblivion until 1967 when The Forsythe Chronicles were serialized on television. He was also the butt of much biased criticism, and the most recent studies dedicated to his personality and work by Dudley Barker (The Man of Principle, London: Helnemann, 1963) and Catherine Duprë (John Galsworthy, a Biography, London: Collins, 1976) confirmed the unfavorable judgment passed on him by D. H. Lawrence in Scrutiny (London, 1928). According to these critics, Galsworthy, for all his commercial success , was a second-rate talent and a traitor to the causes he had initially espoused. Alec Frëchet's John Galsworthy, the Man, the Novelist, the Social Critic, far from joining in the debunking, does much to rehabilitate the writer and his work, and without such indiscriminate praise as H. V. Marrot (The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, London: Heinemann, 1935) and R. H. Mottram (For Some We Loved, London: Hutchinson, 1956) lavished on him. For the general public today, Galsworthy's popularity and reputation rest almost entirely on The Forsyte Saga (1922) and its sequel, A Modern Comedy (1929), a great family epic whose tremendous success can be ascribed to Its catching exactly the mood of the times, for it "gives its most concrete, 77 strongest and most forceful expression to the anti-Victorian feeling of the postwar period" (p. 13). But Frêchet rightly notes that Galsworthy was too fair-minded and balanced to persist in such an extreme attitude. His indulgence and genuine sense of equity made him realize the qualities of the very people he had criticized and his apparent about-face antagonized many who had praised him for the virulence of his pre-war attacks on the privileged classes. Fréchet's purpose is not to write yet another sensational, dramatized biography but to use all the material available, including the family papers lent to the Birmingham University Library in order to provide a satisfactory reassessment. He interprets facts and traces influences, notably that of the writer's legal training, on his manner and work. He analyzes the various aspects of his personality—obvious throughout his work—his deep humanity, his love of nature, his social conscience, and the acute feeling of other people 's sufferings which were quickened by his long and frustrated affair with Ada, his first cousin's wife, whom he was later to...