Galsworthy: The Paradox of Realism

288 GALSWORTHY: THE PARADOX OF REALISM By Carol A. Hawkes (Finch College) Realism as verisimilitude seems enviably simple to the twentieth century. If one seeks only the illusion of reality, achieved through factual detail, then realism is to be found in eighteenth century pseudo-histories and "true accounts" designed to allay puritanical suspicion of the fictional lie. But even a hundred years ago realism had come to mean more than thato It had come to mean a vivid rendering of ordinary experience as opposed to the exotic imagination of romanticism. By this definition, Dickens and Thackeray are realists despite their sentimentality. And if concern for the ordinary is extended to Include an acceptance, motivated by "pity and love" as George Eliot puts It, of the common-to-mlddle-class citizen in the events and circumstances of his daily life, then almost all of the Victorian novelists are realists, for all their spirit of reform. It is in that spirit of reform, as a matter of fact, that the Victorians pay highest tribute to the real. Theirs Is a kind of lover's quarrel with reality. They seek the improvement, not the annihilation and replacement of the world they know. They question practice, but not value. The law's rigidity and the law's delay hang darkly over Oliver Twist and Bleak House, but law Itself remains a social good. The spiritual confines of Mlddlemarch are too narrow for the soul of a Dorothea, yet there Is no denial of the need for moral order. Intellectual snobbery at Chrlstmlnster crushes Jude Fawley's aspiration, but misuse of learning does not negate the ideal. The Victorians address their readers in a context of shared beliefs. In their hands the novel reaaimg a "public Instrument," to use David Daiches· term. Even the standard against which the faults of their world are measured, like the substantive detail of their work, is derived from a level of reality - from the existence of principles to which every right-thinking man is presumed to subscribe. Hypocrisy, not complacency, is the capital sin of this world, for the complacent man is merely too secure, but the hypocrite betrays the public creed. In twentieth-century novels, the problem becomes infinitely more complex as a questioning of the creed Itself begins. The writer now Is likely to ask not merely whether the meek should possess the earth but whether either possession or meekness is Justifiable, and if so, whether the earth is worth possessing. Whatever the reasons for this breakdown of the comfortable Victorian consensus, the change of attitude eventually leads to the development of new fictional techniques, from stream-fo-consciousness to verbal collage . Yet central to the movement, from its beginning to the present day, is realism - a new realism - a paradoxical realism that uses its power of evoking the familiar world as an Instrument of 289 revulsion from the values on which that world was built. John Galsworthy occupies a pivotal position in giving expression to this change; ironically so, since he eventually returned almost to the position of the nineteenth-century reformer. It is in his social fiction prior to the first World War that he prepares the way for an alienated generation a half-century younger than his own. His personal reasons for disaffection at the time - his love affair in conflict with social strictures, his lack of money until his father's death, his consciousness of the tensions between human nature and convention - are too well known to require discussion here. Certainly they were serious, but no more serious than those of many of his contemporaries. His first two novels, in fact, Jocelyn (1898) and Villa Rubeln (I9OO), as well as his two early collections of short stories, are essentially romantic in theme and in their use of exotic setting, dramatic episode, and high-flown passion. Not until The Island Pharisees (1904) did Galsworthy emerge as both a realist and an alien in his world. The slow and difficult evolution of this novel has been described by both Galsworthy and Edward Garnett.l The fact is that it reflects the process as well as the result of a changing outlook. There are passages in...