John Galsworthy.—John Galsworthy was born in Coombe, Surrey, in 1867. He was graduated from Oxford with an honor degree in law in 1889 and was called to the bar in 1890. He traveled for a large part of two years, visiting, among other places, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the Fiji Islands. On one of these trips he met Joseph Conrad, then a sailor, and they became warm friends. Galsworthy was twenty-eight when he began to write.
[Illustration: JOHN GALSWORTHY.]
Four of his novels deal with the upper classes of English society. The Man of Property (1906) treats of the wealthy class, The Country House (1907) presents the conservative country squire, Fraternity (1909) portrays the intellectual class, and The Patrician (1911) pictures the aristocrat. Galsworthy is the relentless analyist of well-to-do, conventional English society. As Frederic Taber Cooper well says, "British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,—these are the themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with a mordant irony."
Since his object is to present problems of life, many of his characters are but types. On the other hand, Soames Forsyte in The Man of Property, Lord Miltoun, Mrs. Noel, and Lady Casterley in The Patrician, are among the most brilliant and real characters in modern fiction. Galsworthy's style is clear, his plot construction is excellent, and his humor in caricaturing social types has many of the qualities of Dickens's.
Herbert George Wells.—Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. He expected to be a shopkeeper and was apprenticed in his fourteenth year to a chemist; but this did not satisfy his ambition. Later, however, he won scholarships that enabled him to take a degree in science. While preparing himself to graduate from the University of London, he worked in Huxley's laboratory. The experiments there inspired him to write stories based on scientific facts and hypotheses, such as The Time Machine (1895) and In the Days of the Comet (1906). Wells is also vitally interested in problems of sociology. The Discovery of the Future (1902) and The Future in America (1906) present possibilities of scientifically planning man's further development. Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905) and Marriage (1912) are his best works, considered as actual novels of character. Kipps is a bitter but strong portrayal of the pretense and hypocrisy of society and of its inertia in responding to human needs, and Marriage is a subtle, psychological analysis of a conjugal misunderstanding and an attempted readjustment. Wells's study of man as a biological development and his preference of actual facts to sentimental conclusions are in accord with the trend of modern social science.
[Illustration: HERBERT GEORGE WELLS.]
The work of Wells covers a wide range of subjects. He has written scientific romances, blood-curdling tales, strange phantasies, prophetic Utopias, and sociological novels. He shows an increasing tendency to depict the human struggle with environment, heredity, and the manifold forces that affect the earning of a livelihood. His characters are more often remembered as specimens exhibiting some phase of life than as attractive or repellent personalities. Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his later work. He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and picturesque English.
Eden Phillpotts was born in India in 1862. His novels, however, are as definitely associated with Devonshire as Hardy's are with Wessex, and Bennett's with North Staffordshire. Phillpotts is noted for his power to paint "landscapes with figures." The "figures" are the farmers, villagers, and shepherds of that part of Devon, known as Dartmoor; and the landscapes are the granite crags, the moors; and farmlands of "good red earth." Widecombe Fair (1913) is the twentieth volume that he has published as a result of twenty years' work among these children of Devon. Sometimes the roughness and untutored emotions of the Dartmoor characters repel the readers; but these characters form strong, picturesque groups of human beings, and their dialect adds a pleasant flavor to the novels. Phillpotts's frequent use of coincidences weakens the effect and mars the naturalness of the plot, since their recurrence comes to be anticipated. Children of the Mist (1898) and Demeter's Daughter (1911) are among his ablest novels.
Maurice Hewlett was born in Kent in 1861, of an old Somerset family. He began writing in his boyhood, giving proof even then of his skill in catching the manner of other writers. His style to-day reëchoes his reading of many authors in Latin, French, Italian, and English.
The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900) shows Hewlett's romantic fancy and love for historical characters and pageants. While this novel is full of life, color, and movement, it displays his proneness to allow the romantic vein to run to the fantastic in both episode and style. The Stooping Lady (1907) deals with the love of a lady of high degree for a humble youth whom her devotion ennobles.