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By William Somerset Maugham (1874—1965)

The name of Somerset Maugham is connected with critical realism in the English literature of the first decades of the present century.

He possessed a keen and observant eye and in his best works he ridiculed philistinism, narrow-mindedness, hy­pocrisy, self-interest, utilitarian approach to art.

His links with realistic art, however, were not so solid as to place him among the best English writers of this period. His work is marred by cynicism and disbelief in human nature. Maugham thinks that it is not in the power of man to reform the world. In his works he compares life to the theatre where human comedy, as old as the world it­self, is being staged. As the course of human life cannot be altered, Maugham believes in the wisdom of those who see the failings of this world but learn to accept it as it is.

W. S. Maugham was a prolific writer. Numerous nov­els, short stories and plays came from his pen. His best novels are "Of Human Bondage", "The Moon and Sixpence", "Cakes and Ale".

Many critics praised Maugham's clear-cut prose. At his best he is an incomparable storyteller. He writes with lucidity and almost ostentatious simplicity. His acid irony and brilliant style helped him win a huge audience of readers.

"The Moon and Sixpence" appeared in 1919. The narra­tive was suggested by the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. The main character of the novel Strickland is a middle-aged stockbroker, who takes up painting, throws over his family, goes to Tahiti and in the few years before his death paints highly original pictures with strange haunting colours.

The novel is an illustration of one of Maugham's favour­ite convictions that human nature is knit of contradictions, that the workings of the human mind are unpredictable. Strickland is concentrated on his art. He is indifferent to love, friendship and kindness, misanthropic and inconsiderate to others. His pictures fall flat on the public and recognition comes to him only after death.

Maugham borrowed the title of the novel from a review of his book "Of Human Bondage". Speaking of the principal character of the book, the reviewer remarks: "Like so many young men he was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet."

The title served to Maugham as a symbol for two oppos­ing worlds — the material world quit by Strickland, where everything is thought of in terms of money, and the world of pure artistry craving for beauty.

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