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Indiana University Studies 



. . One of the delightful things about these asides is their con- 

 foVniify to our own experience. We have thought the same 

 tiling many times ourselves — only we did not, and could not, 

 put it in his inimitable way. For example, look at these passages: 

 • ' What a singular thing it is, when you come to think of it, that so many 

 r people will sell you a thing worth a pound for sixpence, who won't give 

 you a shilling outright on any terms! 19 



Have you not yourself been interrupted again and again in your narra- 

 tlve of your symptoms by your friend's anxiety to give details of his o w n : 

 or indeed (if he was Mrs. Packles) to lay claim to afflictions precisely identical 

 but of greater severity? 20 



In this way the most harmless little fib will grow and grow, and become 

 an infliction to its papa or mamma, who will have to nourish and protect 

 it as though it were truly the apple of their eye. 21 



■•>** We have all seen ''strangers converse freely and unbend at a 

 Fire or a really satisfactory Accident, with loss of life". 22 We 

 have all experienced this waitress: "She had on orderly soul, for 

 she turned over the lump of sugar that had a little butter on it, 

 jso as to lie on the buttery side and look more tidj^-like." 23 When 

 De Morgan delays his narrative with such charming revelations 

 of his personality, we do not care how leisurely he proceeds, for, 

 like Dickens and Thackeray, he is at his best when moving slowly. 

 However, when, in the fashion that George Eliot started, he 

 begins to indulge in lengthy, protracted analyses of the minds 

 and motives of his characters, he stra3 T s from his best — for, as one 

 critic has remarked of George Eliot, 'The reading of her later 

 works is scarce to be classed among the pleasures of life; it 

 is one of the duties; there is so much to learn in them." 24 If she 

 influenced him at all, this fondness for psychological analysis 

 represents the extent of her influence upon him. Dickens and 

 Thackeray show no signs of it. The former, on the whole, con- 

 fines himself to the external aspects of his characters; the latter 

 informs us as to the mental stages which his people have reached, 

 but does not show the processes by which they got there. Traces 

 of George Eliot's method appear in all of De Morgan's novels. 

 In It Never Can Happen Again we certainly grow very tired of 

 Alfred Challis and his "soul-brushings". Who cares to be kept 

 informed in regard to so uninteresting a person? Much rather 

 would we hear Lizarann or her "daddy" talk. Nor in Alice-} or- 



^Somehow Good, p. 555. 

 °-°Joseph Vance, pp. 101-102. 

 °-iThe Old Madhouse, p. 448. 

 '^Joseph Vance, p. 286. 

 «-*When Ghost Meets Ghost, p. 2. 



^Charles F. Home, The Technique of the Novel, p. 186. 



