﻿Male: Will lain De Morgan 



n 



necessary details, and unless they have a good deal of significance, 

 especially as perspective, he omits them. George Eliot and a 

 great many writers pack their incidents in a great deal of un- 

 necessary wadding, but he seldom commits this offense 



In certain respects De Morgan's stories, as stories, remind us 

 of the Victorians. Like them, as we have seen, he is no impres- 

 sionist, but writes his stories on a broad scale, and extends them 

 over a great canvas. He does not confine himself to the study 

 of a single situation or problem; almost without exception, his 

 stories include many characters, a number of years, and varied 

 scenes. Unlike the Victorians, he writes without a purpose. 42 

 He does not satirize society, like Thackeray, or reform abuses, 

 like Dickens, or preach, like George Eliot. 43 In his view of life 

 and intellectual training, too, he belongs to the present time. 

 His treatment of Rosalind and Sally in Somehow Good shows how 

 far removed he stands from Hawthorne's Puritanism in The 

 Scarlet Letter and Dickens' attitude toward Emily in David 

 Copper field. He has a modern Anew of women, to say the least: 

 Alice-for-Short smokes a cigarette now and then. His treatment 

 of ghosts conforms to modern notions, 44 and he has this age's 

 interest in psychical research. His theology, too. is up-to-date: 

 Dr. Thorpe's belief concerning the hereafter, "'the death of the 

 ghost in the corpse", is the modern statement of the annihilation 

 theory. 45 



Technically. De Morgan's stories have the weaknesses that 

 we find in those of the Early Victorians, tho in a smaller degree. 

 His plots lack probability. For instance, in Alice-for-Short and 

 The Old Madhouse, the ghosts appear too often for real ghosts: in 

 Joseph Vance Christopher Vance's rise to sudden fortune is more 

 phenomenal than credible; 46 in Somehow Good the circumstances 

 that result in Fenwick's return to his wife could hardly have 

 happened. The explanation of Dr. Cartaret's disappearance, in 

 The Old. Madhouse, is rather melodramatic. Since, to our author, 

 as to his great predecessors, the plot is secondary, characteriza- 

 tion holds the paramount place, and the plots take care of them- 

 selves. Consequently, they have no construction. 462 In the 



-The title Somehow Good sounds as if it belonged to a purpose novel, but there 

 is no obtrusive teaching in the story. 



"Professor Phelps, in his Essays on Modern Novelists (p. 27), cannot be serious 

 when he says. "Indeed, all of Mr. De Morgan's books might well be circulated as 

 anti-alcohol tracts; the real villain in his tragedies is drink." 



"Of. Alice-for-Short and The Old Madhouse. 



*° Joseph Vance, chap. xl. 



«Cf. W. L. Phelps, Essays on Modern Novelists, p. 20. 



46a Mrs. De Morgan has made an interesting statement in this regard {The Old 

 Madhouse, p. 566) : "When my husband started on one of his novels, he did so without 

 making any definite plot. He created his characters and then waited for them to act 

 and evolve their own plot." 



