﻿Hale: William De Morgan 



7 



If, as some critics assert, Thackeray was a cynic and a snob, 

 there De Morgan parts company with him. Our author is more 

 like Dickens, big-hearted and catholic, even in dealing with small 

 souls like Goody Vereker, or Lucy Snaith, or such villains as 

 Thornton Daverill and his son. In the tones of his asides, 13 

 however, he resembles Thackeray rather than Dickens, for the 

 former has a lighter touch and does not seem so serious. 14 Thus 

 Thackeray often speaks as he draws the reader away from his 

 story : 



The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors. Be the cock of 

 your village; the queen of your coterie; and, besides very great persons, the 

 people whom Fate has specially endowed with this kindly consolation, are 

 those who have seen what are called better days — those who have had 

 losses. I am like Caesar, and of a noble mind: if I cannot be first in Picca- 

 dilly, let me try Hatton Garden, and see whether I cannot lead the Ion 

 there. 15 



Dickens does not moralize so often as Thackeray, but when 

 he does, he has an aside like this: 



Breakings up are capital things in our school days, but in after life 

 they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are 

 every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and 

 wide; and the boys and girls never come back again. 16 



Our author omits the ye's and thou's that Thackeray so fre- 

 quently employs. And in his asides he does not, like George 

 Eliot, preach sermons. He reflects on life after this delightful 

 manner: 



There is nothing stranger in nature than the development of odiousness. 

 What an entirely delightful person was ***** when he was 

 eight months old, in all the bloom of his creases, furnished with a matchless 

 nape to his neck in which his appreciators might burrow; his premature 

 baldness beginning to show a light down of premature hair; his premature 

 arms that would not bend at the joints, being held by two firm but tender 

 crease-flanks; and that always did precisely the same thing suddenly; his 

 delightful practice of stopping abruptly at the end of the first syllable of 

 speech. What an entirely satisfactory and adequate little human creature 

 as far as it went! And look at it now that it has gone forty years farther. 

 I ask you, at the risk of outrage to your feelings and Mrs. Grundy's, to say 

 what you would do if * * * * * were fetched down now in his 

 nightgown to be shown. 17 



Self-help is a glorious thing, and one of our numerous birth-rights, but 

 it should stop short of helping oneseif to all of the gravy in the dish. 18 



13 By the "asides" is meant the moralizings and the like, in distinction from 

 the comments on the characters. 



"George Eliot's asides are heavier and more "theological", or didactic, than 

 De Morgan's. 



lb The Newcomes, vol. I, chap. ix. 



^Pickwick Papers, chap. xxx. 



^Joseph Vance, p. 153. 



™Ibid., p. 154. 



