‘Sentiment Wasn’t Dead’

Abstract

Although John Galsworthy enjoyed tremendous popularity as an author during his lifetime and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932, he is infrequently read or taught. A middlebrow writer who criticized modernist art in his novels, Galsworthy now can be read as an obstinate defender of outmoded Edwardian ideals. Both Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence criticized Galsworthy for his ‘materialism’—an emphasis on property, money and physical objects that they saw as superficial and limited. In Virginia Woolf’s highly influential articulation of the transition between the ‘Edwardian’ and ‘Georgian’ authors, she groups Galsworthy with Arnold Bennett and H G Wells as typical old-fashioned ‘Edwardians’, defined by their materialism and tendency to lay ‘an enormous stress upon the fabric of things’.1 This focus on the material world disqualifies Galsworthy from high aesthetic achievement. In contrast, Woolf claims that the new generation of writers that she identifies as ‘Georgian’—‘Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey, Mr Joyce, and Mr Eliot’2—focus on character and psychology. Lawrence makes a similar criticism in Scrutinies, castigating Galsworthy for creating characters that consist entirely of the sum of their social and financial relationships. These ‘social beings’3 attach ‘too much importance to the external objective reality’ and lose their ‘natural innocent pride’.4 In the face of such forceful criticisms from influential modernists, Galsworthy’s own articulation of the importance of engaging with the material world disappears from the critical gaze.