“Almost Passionate Impartiality”

Abstract

The public sense of Galsworthy as representing something “new” evaporated rather rapidly. Allowing for transatlantic time-lag, in 1909 Ellery Sedgwick (one of the first American advocates of his talent) could still, in refusing two short Galsworthy pieces for the Atlantic Monthly he edited because they had already been published in England, write of his respect for Galsworthy because “for to me he typifies a new England with which I feel great sympathy”.¹ By the end of 1911, in the English Press, Compton Mackenzie’s first novel, The Passionate Elopement, was widely praised because it was “new”, owing nothing to the old conventions and concerns of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy.²