trash, no sensation-monger, has ever got under way with more speed, or taken a swifter initial plunge into the very heart of action. One memorable day in 1873, Count Tolstoi picked up a little story by Pushkin, which his ten-year-old son had been reading aloud to a member of the family. The great Russian glanced at the first sentence, "The guests began to assemble the evening before the fête." He was mightily pleased. "That's the way to begin a story!" he cried. "The reader is taken by one stroke into the midst of the action. Another writer would have commenced by describing the guests, the rooms, while Pushkin—he goes straight at his goal." Some of those in the room laughed, and suggested that Tolstoi himself appropriate such a beginning and write a novel. He immediately retired and wrote the first sentences of Anna Karenina; which is literally the manner in which that masterpiece came into being.[1] Now if one will open any of Mr. De Morgan's works, he will find the procedure that Tolstoi praised. Something immediately happens—happens before we have any idea of the real character of the agents, and before we hardly know where we are. Indeed, the first chapter of Somehow Good may serve as an artistic model for the commencement of a novel. It is written with extraordinary vivacity and spirit. But the author understands better how to begin his works than he does how to end them. The close of Joseph Vance is like the mouth of the Mississippi, running off into the open sea through a great variety of passages. The ending of Alice-for-Short is accomplished only by notes, comment, and citations. And Somehow Good is simply snipped off, when it might conceivably have proceeded on its way. His fourth novel is the only one that ends as well as it begins.
You cannot judge books, any more than you can individuals, by the first words they say. If I could only discover somewhere some man, woman, or child who had not read Joseph Vance, I should like to tell him the substance of the first chapter, and ask him to guess what sort of a story had awakened my enthusiasm. Suppose some person who had never heard of Browning should stumble on Pauline, and read the first three lines:—
"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me—thy soft breast
Shall pant to mine—bend o'er me—thy sweet eyes,
And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms"
one sees the sharp look of expectation on the reader's face, and one almost laughs aloud to think what there is in store for him. He will very soon exhibit symptoms of bewilderment, and before he has finished the second page he will push the book aside with an air of pious disappointment. No slum story ever opened more promisingly than Joseph Vance. We are led at the very start into a dirty rum-shop; there immediately ensues a fight between two half-drunken loafers in the darkness without; this results in the double necessity of the police and the hospital; and a broken bottle, found against a dead cat, is the missile employed to destroy a human eye. In Alice-for-Short, the first chapter shows us a ragged little girl of six carrying a jug of beer from a public-house to a foul basement, where dwell her father and mother, both victims of alcohol. The police again. On the third page of Somehow Good, we have the "fortune to strike on a rich vein of so-called life in a London slum." The hero gives a drunken, murderous scoundrel a "blow like the kick of a horse, that lands fairly on the eye socket with a cracking concussion that can be heard above the tumult, and is followed by a roar of delight from the male vermin." Once more the police. It Never Can Happen Again begins in a corner of London unspeakably vile.
Zola and Gorky at their best, and worst—for it is sometimes hard to make the distinction—have not often surpassed the first chapters of Mr. De Morgan's four novels. Never has a writer waded more unflinchingly into the slime. And yet the very last word to characterise these books would be the word "slum-stories." The foundations of Mr. De Morgan's work, like the foundations of cathedrals, are deep in the dirt; but the total impression is one of exceeding beauty. Indeed, with our novelist's conception of life, as a progress toward something high and sublime, where evil not only exists, but is a necessary factor in development, the darkness of the shadows proves the intense radiance of the sun. The planet Venus is so bright, we are accustomed to remark, that it sometimes casts a shadow. Christopher Vance emerges from beastly degradation to a position of power, influence, and usefulness; the Heath family, in receiving Alice, entertain an angel unawares; and the march of Somehow Good goes from hell, through purgatory, and into paradise. It is a divine comedy, in more ways than one; and shows that sometimes the goal of ill is very unlike the start.
We had not read far into Joseph Vance before we shouted Dickens Redivivus! or some equivalent remark in the vernacular. We made this outcry with no tincture of depreciation and with no yelp of the plagiarism-hunting hound. It requires little skill to observe the similarity to Dickens, as was proved by the fact that everyone noticed it. In general, the shout was one of glad recognition; it was the welcome given to the sound of a voice that had been still. It was not an imitation: it was a reincarnation. The spirit of Dickens had really entered into William De Morgan; many chapters in Joseph Vance sounded as if they had been dictated by the ghost of the author of Copperfield. No book since 1870 had given so vivid an impression of the best-beloved of all English novelists. This is meant to be high praise. When Walt Whitman was being exalted for his unlikeness to the great poets, one sensible critic quietly remarked, "It is easier to differ from the great poets than to resemble them." To "remind us of Dickens" would be as difficult for many modern novelists as for a molehill to remind us of the Matterhorn.
We may say, however, that Joseph Vance and It Never Can Happen Again are more like Dickens in character and in detail than is Alice-for-Short; and that the latter is closer to Dickens than is Somehow Good. The Reverend Benaiah Capstick infallibly calls to mind the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Weller; with the exception that the latter was also spirituous. That kind of religion does not seem strongly to appeal to either novelist; for Mr. Stiggins took to drink, and Capstick to an insane asylum. There are many things in the conversation of Christopher Vance that recall the humorous world-wisdom of the elder Weller; and so we might continue, were it profitable. Another great point of resemblance between Mr. De Morgan and Dickens is seen in the method of narration chosen by each. Here William De Morgan is simply following in the main track of English fiction, where the novelist cannot refrain from editing the text of the story. The course of events is constantly interrupted by the author's gloss. Now when the author's mind is not particularly interesting, the comment is an unpleasant interruption; it is both impertinent and dull. But when the writer is himself more profound, more clever, and more entertaining than even his best characters, we cannot have too much of him. It is true that Mr. De Morgan has told a good story in each of his novels; but it is also true that the story is not the cause of their reputation. We read these books with delight because the characters are so attractive, and because the author's comments on them and on events are so penetrating. If it is true, as some have intimated, that this method of novel-writing proves that Mr. De Morgan, whatever he is, is not a literary artist, then it is undeniable that Fielding, Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray are not artists; which is absurd, as Euclid would say. Great books are invariably greater than our definitions of them. Browning and Wagner composed great works of Art without paying much attention to the rules of the game.
As compared with French and Russian fiction, English novels from Fielding to De Morgan have unquestionably sounded a note of insincerity. One reason for this lies in the fact that to the Anglo-Saxon mind, Morality has always seemed infinitely more important than Art. Matthew Arnold spent his life fighting the Philistines; but when he said that conduct was three-fourths of life, there was jubilation in the enemy's camp. Now Zola declared that a novel could no more be called immoral in its descriptions than a text-book on physiology; the novelist commits a sin when he writes a badly constructed sentence. A disciple of this school insisted that it was more important to have an accurate sense of colour than to have a clear notion of right and wrong. Fortunately for the true greatness of humanity, you never can get the average Englishman or American to swallow such doctrine. But it is at the same time certain that among English-speaking peoples Art has seldom been taken with sufficient seriousness. We are handy with our fists; but you cannot imagine us using them in behalf of literature, as we do for real or personal property. So far as I know, an English audience in the theatre has never been excited on a purely artistic question—a matter of frequent occurrence on the Continent. We seem to believe