﻿Hale: William De Morgan 



13 



It has been objected that, whereas in reading a story, o^c 

 wants to forget the printed page and believe that the events are 

 all happening, this method destroys all the illusion that the author 

 has been able to produce. 51 However, this can be said for it: 

 altho it takes away the illusion that the events are happening, it 

 increases the illusion that they did happen. For example, in the 

 first passage quoted above, altho it is true that we are conscious 

 that we are reading a story, at the same time, the allusion to Sally 

 and Laetitia, as if they were real people, and the expression "our 

 means of collecting information", as if the events actually 

 happened, add very much to the impression of reality. The same 

 may be said of the other passage. We really believe all the 

 stronger that Mr. Challis is living and was very recently with a 

 large and lively company of friends. 52 



In the third place. De Morgan s plots have defective conclu- 

 sions — externally — that is, in the way in which they are in-] 

 dicated. De Morgan loves to drop his curtain suddenly at a 

 very exciting moment or interesting catastrophe, and then supply 

 in the most round-about way the barest details of what we have 

 a right to know. Joseph Vance suddenly quits writing, and tfee j 

 rest of the facts we get in a very improbable, complicated shape 

 in a "Note by the Editor" and a "Postscript -by the Publishers". 

 Nothing more unnecessary or unnatural could have been devised. 

 The impression forces itself upon us that the author is tired and- 

 does not care how slouchy an exit he makes. Alice-for-Short has 

 an Addendum in the form of "An extract from the diary of the 

 late Abbe Bernadin Fabrot, of .Boulestin l'Annonay", as pub- 

 lished in the Journal d'Hier, February 29, 1853. Somehow Good 

 provokingly ends with two letters ■ — which does not seem fair, 

 after the way we have been worked up over the drowning and 

 resuscitation. In It Never Can Happen Again the thread sud- 

 denly snaps, and twelve months later the brief conversation 

 between Athelstan Taylor and his wife (which is the first news 

 that we have of their marriage) supplies all that we are oxer to 

 know. An Affair of Dishonor concludes with a manuscript con- 

 fession that seems to have- been made expressly for the reader, 

 as a means of escape for the author. "A. Belated Pendrift" 



5iW. L. Phelps. Essays on Modern Xovelists, pp. 13-16. 



52 De Morgan carries this device even farther — hardly so effectively. For 

 example, in Somehow Good, chapter v. he makes a reference back to chapters i and ii: 

 "It refers, at any rate, to the way in which the contents of chapters i and ii had become 

 records of the past six months later, when the snow was on the ground four inches 

 thick oh Christmas — two inches, at least, having been last night's contribution — 

 and made it all sweet and smooth all over so that there need be.no Unpleasantness." 

 Cf. also Alice-foi--Short, pp. 478, 544. 



