The central theme is that of class distinction. In the play The Silver Box he shows the difference between the rich and the poor in the interpretation of the law. In the tragedy Justice the barbarity of the English Penal Code is revealed; we see that justice is kinder to the rich man than to his poorer brother. His plays, like his novels, are often didactic; that is to say, they are directed not towards entertainment but towards enlightening the minds of their audiences, towards guiding them to the solution of social problems and to the clearing up of social abuses. They are full of ideas and thoughts, they are intellectually stimulating.is not only a novelist and a dramatist, but also a short story writer and an essayist. His short stories give a most complete, and critical picture of English bourgeois society in the first part of the XX century. It is in his short stories that Galsworthy deals with the most vital problems of the day - he condemns the imperialist war, exposes capitalism that brings suffering and unemployment to the people, showing his sympathy for the so-called little men and reflecting their hard life and tragic fate, though his characters are mostly members of the upper middle-class, with which he was wholly familiar.is a great master of exciting plots, realistic depiction of life and characters, of critical attitude towards national prejudices. He tried to revive the realistic traditions of his predecessors - the writers belonging to the brilliant school of English novelists. Though Galsworthy s criticism is not as sharp and acute as that of Dickens and Thackeray, he is justly considered to be one of the greatest realists of his time. The novels and plays of Galsworthy give a most complete picture of English bourgeois society in the XX century. A bourgeois himself Galsworthy nevertheless clearly sees the decline of his class and truthfully portrays this in his works. To him it is not man who is wicked-but society that is wrong. He believes in man as all humanists do. Yet one cannot help seeing the limitations of Galsworthy s realism. His criticism of the bourgeoisie is ethical and esthetic only. He aims to improve his class, but in no case does he want it to lose its ruling position. The descriptive talent of the author, the richness of his style, sincerity and keen sense of beauty put Galsworthy on the level with the most prominent writers of world literature.Forsyte SagaMan of Property. At the beginning of the novel we see the Forsyte family in full plumage. All the Forsytes gather at the house of old Jolyon to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon s granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. Old Jolyon is the head of the family, eighty years of age with his white hair, his domelike forehead and an immense white moustache, he holds himself extremely upright and seems master of perennial youth. He and his five brothers and four sisters (James, Timothy, Nickolas, Rodger and others) represent the first generation of the Forsytes. All of them are rich businessmen, heads of various firms and companies - big landowners, salesmen, lawyers, publishers. With distrust and uneasiness they watch June s fiancГ© - a young architect without any fortune. In their opinion Jolyon ought never to have allowed the engagement. Bosinney seems to be an impractical fellow with no sense of property, while the Forsytes consider property to be a sacred thing, the object of worship and respect. Their aim of life is to enlarge their wealth by all means. They are clinging to any kind of property - money, wives, reputation.most typical man of property is Soames Forsyte, a representative of the second generation of the Forsytes. Soames sacred sense of property even extends to works of art, human feelings and family relations.married Irene, 20-year old daughter of a poor professor, a woman who has never loved him , Soames treats her as though she were his property. Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none. In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body - if he indeed could do that, which he was beginning t...
