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Indiana University Studies 



Only Tisha's teeth never could get as big as that! Nor wiggle. 135 

 Ever since, the sea had broken over it at high tides, and if you cared at 



all about your clothes you wouldn't go to the end of it, if you were me. 



Because the salt gets into them and spoils the dye. Besides, you have to 



change everything. 136 



S3 he sat down to think where the dooce that box had got put. 137 

 This method of De Morgan's adds most unmistakably an 

 atmosphere of reality to his stories. It has laid him liable, 

 however, to the charge of lacking art and has brought a good deal 

 of adverse criticism against his novels. Lady Cecil has con- 

 demned him very emphatically on this account : 



For agreed as we are that Mr. De Morgan's success is deserved, we are 

 yet more agreed that his deserved success has had very little to do with art. 

 Mr. De Morgan is like a stranger who has safely traversed a difficult and 

 hostile country provided with neither guide nor safe conduct. He has been 

 congratulated on his feat, but official dignity has hastened to point out that, 



strictly speaking he ought to have perished by the way There 



remains Mr. De Morgan's style, which to tell the truth, has shocked us 

 not a little. If to express your thought in the form of common speech is to 

 be heretical against art, then Mr. De Morgan is hopelessly heretical. . . . 

 But the means of transmission, if it is to be admitted as style at all, is cer- 

 tainly an undressed style. It is not a style for Sundays nor for the library. 

 The tool is excellently fitted to its purpose and to the workman's hand, 

 but is was never forged in any workshop of art. 138 



To Lady Cecil it should be answered that, instead of this 

 method of De Morgan's being inartistic, it really is the highest 

 form of art. What constitutes the artistic and the inartistic? Is 

 not an author artistic or inartistic according to the degree that he 

 produces artistic results? Real art has never been confined to 

 hide-bound rules of style. The test of art is this — does the work 

 produce the impression of real life? Now, this is exactly the effect 

 that DeMorgan's novels do produce. As we have seen, this method 

 has allowed him greater freedom for the play of his humor; it has 

 brought him closer to his readers: but more than anything else, 

 it has enabled him to produce some charming stories with the 

 highest degree of verisimilitude to which the English novel has 

 yet attained. And he has failed onh^ when, heeding, perhaps, 

 such criticism as Lady Cecil's, he has departed from this style of 

 writing. 139 Is it possible that a "tool excellently fitted to its 

 purpose", when that purpose is the representation of life, cannot 

 have been "forged in any workshop of art"? One would think 



^Somehow Good, p. 154. 



»«76id.. p. 385. 



™ 7 A Likely Story, p. 250. 



13 «Lady Eleanor Cecil, Living Age, May 30, 1908, pp. 567-570. 

 139 This De Morgan has clone in An Affair of Dishonor, which is not comparable 

 with his other works. 



