Naturalist Drama and Galsworthy

NATURALIST DRAMA AND GALSWORTHY FIFTY YEARS AGO naturalism was the great new movement in the English theater, and John Galsworthy was its dignified prophet. But yesterday's masterpieces have become today's museum-pieces, and Galsworthy's voice is stilled. If he had been a bad dramatist, there would be no critical problem, but his plays have the virtues-serious content, clear structure, interesting characters, brilliant individual scenes-that usually guarantee long life in the theater; some of his scenes, such as that of Falder's isolation in Justice, are as good now as they ever were. As a whole, however, his work has not worn well, and what astonished its first audiences now often seems pallid or melodramatic or naive.My purpose is to suggest that this lack of durability is the fault not of Galsworthy's incompetence but of his strict adherence to naturalist theory. ' Unlike many of his contemporaries, Galsworthy was not so adept in literary techniques that he could choose whichever he felt best. Where the careers of most dramatists of the period show a gradual move away from realism, Galsworthy was from the beginning to the end true to his original ideas, and his sole attempt at another mode (The Little Dream, Ig11) is a self-confessed failure. By tem~ perament, by instinct, he was a realist: "My dramatic invasion and the form of it, was dictated rather by revolt at the artificial nature of the English play of the period, and by a resolute intention to present real life on the stage."l As late as 1925, close to the end of his dramatic career, he said: "With plays it is only a question of the 'fourth wall'; if you have a subject of sufficient dramatic interest , and visualize it powerfully enough, perfectly naturally, as if you were the fourth wall, you will be able to present it to others in the form of a good play."2 The "others" agreed. Galsworthy made his name as a realist even with his first play, The Silver Box, which opened in Ig06 as part of the famous Court Theatre seasons. As he himself wrote years later: "I think I can claim that The Silver Box was something really new on the English stage. It was certainly taken 1 Letter of August 23, 1925, in H. V. Manot, The Life and Letter$ of John Galsworthy (New York, 1936), p. 793. II As recounted by his nephew; Marrot, p. 565. 65 66 MODERN DRAMA May as such."s The public acclaimed Strite in 1909, and in 1910 Justice had such a sensational closeness to real life and to problems of immediate interest to its audience that it produced changes in the regulations governing the solitary confinement of prisoners. In the next decade, Galsworthy, with Shaw and Granville-Barker, led the Renaissance of the New Drama. Ashley Dukes' comment (made in 1911) shows how they were regarded: "Bernard Shaw and Mr. Barker brought the ideas; in a measure, too, the art. Mr. Galsworthy 's preoccupation is with actuality." In 1913 one critic listed Galsworthy's leading characteristics as "concentration on the graver common aspects of contemporary life, strong emphasis on incidents as the outcome of forces stronger than the individual, and austere fidelity to actual fact." In 1914 another wrote of his work that it was "strong, realistic, and, above all, it has no taint of the theatre. No faintest suspicion of stagey effect clings to a single one of his plays. They are, to use his own epithet, 'photographic' drama."4 After the war, Galsworthy repeated his prewar successes in the repertory theaters by becoming commercially profitable with The Skin Game (19l!0) arid Loyalties (19l!l!), and before his death in 1933 he had received both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize. Real life, uncontaminated by the theater-dramatist and critics agreed. The old gods seemed totally thrown down, and Galsworthy's claims for naturalism seemed genuinely modest: My own method was the outcome of the trained habit (which I was already employing in my novels) of naturalistic dialogue guided, informed, and selected by a controlling idea, together with an intense visualisation of types and...