“To Invent Depths Is Not Art Either”

Abstract

When he returned to England in the spring of 1895, John Galsworthy began to work seriously at becoming a writer. At first in his legal chambers, then, in the succession of “private quarters” he rented, he wrote nearly every day. Although he no longer made even a pretence at practising law, he remained, perhaps in deference to what were still clearly his parents’ wishes, officially a member of the Bar, for he was listed in the records of the General Council of the Bar until 1900.¹ His writing, as he often stated afterwards, was a deliberate attempt to duplicate the styles of Turgenev and Maupassant. As he explained, in one version of a speech on his literary origins that he later gave several times, he very much valued Turgenev, to whom he would always “acknowledge a great debt”: “To him and to de Maupassant I served that spiritual and technical apprenticeship which every young writer serves, guided by some deep kinship in spirit to one or other of the old past-masters of his craft.”² His published version of the speech is called “Six Novelists in Profile. An Address: 1924”.