﻿Male: William De Morgan 



27 



that the canon of the artistic had been closed a long time ago — 

 instead of always being in a state of development and subject to 

 revision thruout the ages yet to be. As Chesterton has said, 

 "The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is 

 simply that it is a time; we all instinctively think of it as the Day 

 of Judgment." 140 De Morgan has produced artistic effects if 

 realistic effects are artistic effects, if reality is great art, and there- 

 fore the limits of art will have to be extended to include his works. 



To call William De Morgan a "belated Early Victorian" is a 

 blunder. It is true, as we have seen, that he has followed the 

 general methods of the Victorians, especially Dickens. In the 

 length of his books, their leisurely, discursive style, the labels on 

 his chapters, his somewhat improbable, badly constructed plots, 

 which are always subordinated to the characterization, his large 

 number of characters, certain qualities of his humor, and his epic 

 rather than impressionistic view of life, he has maintained the 

 Victorian tradition. But, as we have also seen, he has carried the 

 novel considerably beyond the development that the Victorians 

 have given it. Altho he has asides somewhat like Thackeray's and 

 George Eliot's, he is not snobbish or cynical, as Thackeray is said 

 to be, and he does not talk so heavily or preach so seriously as 

 George Eliot. He analyzes actions and motives in certain respects 

 like her, but he does not go to the extremes that she does. Closely 

 as he has followed Dickens, he has avoided caricature, he has 

 created characters that have complex natures and that develop, 

 and he has expressed the emotions with reserve and restraint. As 

 compared with these Victorians, he has made his novels shorter; 

 he has eliminated all lengthy objective descriptions of people and 

 places, especially those of nature; he has created men and women 

 and boys and girls of all classes; he has considerably developed the 

 representation of conversation; he has elevated the quality of 

 humor beyond that of the Victorians; he has put into his works the 

 social, intellectual, and ethical spirit of the present day; he has 

 disregarded the conventional vocabulary and idiom, and has set 

 a new style for the realistic novel; and he has given the English 

 novel the highest degree of verisimilitude that it has ever attained. 



If it be granted that to this extent De Morgan has developed 

 and modernized the Victorian novel, how shall we estimate him 

 as a novelist? Certainly, he is not entirely a Victorian; for will 

 not all agree that, instead of borrowing from his great predecessors 



u°G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, p. 291. 



