﻿Hale: William De Morgan 



5 



magnified description of a minute part of life, and his work has 

 many excellent qualities wanting in that of his predecessors, but he 

 fails to give their elemental, universal impression of life. 



In the third place, since De Morgan is primarily interested in 

 people, characterization is the fundamental thing with him. But 

 a character seems most vivid and distinct in the process of de- 

 velopment. Therefore, in order to have sufficient time for the 

 development of his characters, and to add the necessary details 

 of atmosphere and perspective, he had to make his volumes large. 



Again, it* has been complained, William De Morgan has the 

 Early Victorian fondness for leisurely procedure. Thus says one 

 reviewer of Joseph Vance: "The book is written in the leisurely 

 fashion. It suggests the talk of an intelligent man who has 

 something to say, and all night in which to say it." 8 Anotrer, 

 speaking for modern fiction, has laid down this law: "The author 

 must go ahead in a straight line, like an express train, never 

 looking back at what happened before, never looking around to 

 see what other people are doing, never allowing the reader to 

 guess what is going to happen next." 9 This is exactly the 

 opposite of what De Morgan has done: an express train is the last 

 thing on earth which he does move like. His modus operandi 

 resembles rather a loaded van attempting an ascent and sliding 

 back as rapidly as it ascends. This, however, is one of his finest 

 characteristics, tho a trait borrowed directly from his predecessors. 

 The modern author holds himself aloof from his pages; he is un- 

 obstrusive, like the teller of the ballad; he is omniscient and 

 omnipresent, but he wears the cap of Fortunatus. De Morgan, 

 like Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot, projects his per- 

 sonality into his stories. He may sit at one side, and we may 

 forget him for a moment, but we know that he is there. In his 

 comments on his characters' conversations, his shrewd observa- 

 tion of their peculiarities, his original moralizings, he belongs to 

 the school of Dickens and Thackeray, and, like them, he is his 

 craft's master. The following comments on their characters will 

 show the close relation of these three authors. 



De Morgan thus describes the attitude of Professor and Mrs. 

 Sales Wilson to each other: 



For a peculiarity in this family was that the two heads of its always 

 spoke to one another through an agent. So clearly was this understood that 

 direct speech between them, on its rare occasions, was always ascribed by 



s Athenreum. July 28, 1906, p. 97. 



• Independent, February 13, 1908, p. 369. 



