﻿Hale: William De Morgan 



LB 



aunt, 61 Alice's father and mother, 60 and Mr. and Mrs. Grewbeer, 57 

 all belong to the "submerged tenth" — and yet each of these 

 characters not only seems entirely different from the others but 

 appears as a real human being whom we recall by name. The 

 same holds true of the charming young girls Lossie, Janey, 58 

 Alice-for-Short, Peggy, 60 Sally," 9 Gwen, 62 , and Elbows. 57 Even 

 where certain accidental marks of resemblance exist, the characters 

 are still sharply differentiated; for example, the two physicians. 

 Dr. Johnson 58 and Prosy, 59 the three old men who die, Verrender, 62 

 the Colonel, and the Major, 59 and the devotees of free love, 

 Challis 61 and Joey Thorpe. 58 Besides these more prominent 

 characters, we can never forget a great many others. Whenever 

 a person enters the story casually, a cab-driver or a street-rat, he 

 has a marked individuality. Porky Owls, 58 Frederick 'Orkins, 61 

 and the unknown boy who insists on guiding Sally thru the fog, 59 

 resemble one another in no respect. 



Our author's possibilities of character portrayal seem inex- 

 haustible. He introduces characters so lavishly that he ap- 

 proaches very closely to prodigality. We meet Mr. Salter in the 

 first chapter of Somehow Good, and that is the last that we ever 

 see of him. We have as short an acquaintance with the man 

 putting down the carpet at Professor Wilson's, 63 Mr. Peter Gunn, 

 the Reverend Mr. Capstick, 64 the grouchy old gentleman on the 

 tube, 63 and many others. A more parsimonious author would 

 have preserved these as copy for future volumes. This liberality, 

 however, has seldom led De Morgan into caricature. With rare 

 exceptions, his people all live. And they do not belong to one 

 class of society, as do most of those of his great predecessors. 

 Dickens came truest to life in describing the lower classes; Thack- 

 eray wrote almost wholly of the upper classes; and George Eliot 

 did her best work as the chronicler of middle-class country life. Yet 

 De Morgan is just as much at home in the slums as with the upper 

 classes. Altho Christopher Vance 64 is perhaps his best character, 

 a number at the other end of the social ladder stand out almost 

 as fine. Nor do his people belong to one class spiritually, tho he 

 has more good than bad, mean ones. We do not get the im- 

 pression from his books, as we do from Thackeray's, that the 

 'world is all bad, and the men and women are all rascals. No 



"The Old Madhouse. 



^Joseph Vance. 



^Somehow Good. 



60 Alice-for-Short. 



v-It Never Can Happen Again. 



**When Ghost Meets Ghost. 



63 Somehow Good. 



64 Joseph Vance. 



