though he had never read one. It has the strangeness of reality. There is no lack of action in these huge narratives: the men and women pass through the most thrilling incidents, and suffer the greatest extremes of passion, pain, and joy that the human mind can endure. We have three cases of drowning, one tremendous fire; and in Somehow Good—which, viewed merely as a story, is the best of them—a highly eventful plot; and, spiritually, the characters give us an idea of how much agony the heart can endure without quite breaking. But though the bare plot seems almost like melodrama, the style is never on stilts. In the most awful crises, the language has the absolute simplicity of actual circumstance. When Rosalind recognises her husband in the cab, we wonder why she takes it so coolly. Some sixty pages farther along, we come upon this paragraph:—
"Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the 'electrocuted' man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took that sanguinary galvanic shock to."
Our author is fond of presenting events of the most momentous consequence through the lips of humble and indifferent observers. It is only the cabman's chance testimony which shows us that even Rosalind's superb self-control had the limit determined by real womanhood; and in Joseph Vance, the great climax of emotion, when Lossie visits her maligned old lover, is given with unconscious force through the faulty vernacular of the "slut" of a servant-maid, who is utterly unaware of the angels that ministered over that scene; and then by the broken English of the German chess-player, equally blind to the divine presence. Compare these two crude testimonies, which make the ludicrous blunders made by the Hostess in that marvellous account of the death of Falstaff, and you have a veritable harmony of the Gospels. Some novelists use an extraordinary style to describe ordinary events; Mr. De Morgan uses an ordinary style to describe extraordinary events.
Even in his latest book, It Never Can Happen Again,[2] the least cheerful of all his productions, the title is intended to be as comforting as Charles Reade's caption, It Is Never Too Late to Mend. In this story, Mr. De Morgan descends into hell. Delirium tremens has never been pictured with more frightful horror than in the awful night when the mad wretch is bent on murder. No scene in any naturalistic novel surpasses this in vivid detail. Indeed, all of Mr. De Morgan's books might well be circulated as anti-alcohol tracts; the real villain in his tragedies is Drink. Even though drunkenness in a certain aspect supplies comedy in Joseph Vance, drink is, after all, the ruin of old Christopher, and we are left with no shade of doubt that this is so. Mr. De Morgan's unquestionable optimism does not blink the dreadful aspects of life, any more than did Browning's. The scene in the hospital, where the fingers without finger-nails clasp the mighty hand in the rubber glove, is as loathsomely horrible as anything to be found in the annals of disease. And the career of Blind Jim, entirely ignorant of his divine origin and destiny, is a series of appalling calamities. He has lost his sight in a terrible accident; he is run over by a waggon, and loses his leg; he is run over by an automobile, and loses his life. He has also lost, though he does not know it, what is far dearer to him than eyes, or legs, or life—his little daughter. And yet we do not need the spirit voice of the dead child to assure us that all is well. Indeed, the tragic history of Jim and Lizarann is not nearly so depressing as the humdrum narrative of the melancholy quarrel between Mr. and Mrs. Challis. In previous novels, the author has been pleased to show us domestic happiness; here we have the dreary round of perpetual discord. Of course no one can complain of Mr. De Morgan for his choice in this matter; it is certainly true that not all marriages are happy, even though the majority of them (as I believe) are. The difficulty is that the triangle in this book—husband, wife, and beautiful young lady—has no corner of real interest. It is not entirely the fault of either Mr. or Mrs. Challis that they separate; there is much to be said on both sides. What we object to is the fact that it is impossible to sympathise with either of them; this is not because each is guilty, but because neither is interesting. We do not much care what becomes of them. And as for Judith, the technical virgin who causes all the trouble, she is a very dull person. We do not need this book to learn that female beauty without brains fascinates the ordinary man. The best scenes are those where Blind Jim and Lizarann appear; they are a couple fully worthy of Dickens at his best. Unfortunately they do not appear often enough to suit us, and they both die. We could more easily have spared Mr. and Mrs. Challis, the latter's abominable tea-gossip friend, and that old hypocritical tiger-cat, Mrs. Challis's mother. Why does Mr. De Morgan make elderly women so disgustingly unattractive? Does his sympathy with life desert him here? The entire Challis household, including the satellites of relationship and propinquity, are hardly worth the author's skill or the reader's attention. One would suppose that a brilliant novelist, like Challis, pulled from the domestic orbit by a comet like Judith, would be for a time in an interesting, if not an edifying, position; but he is not. Perhaps Mr. De Morgan wishes to show with the impartiality of a true chronicler of life that a married man, drawn away by his own lust, and enticed, can be just as dull in sin as in virtue. Yet the long dreary family storm ends in sunshine; the discordant pair are redeemed by Love—the real motive power of this story—and one feels that it can never happen again. In spite of Mr. De Morgan's continual onslaught on creeds, Athelstan Taylor, who believes the whole Apostles' Creed, compares very favourably with Challis, who believes only the first seven and the last four words of it, apparently the portion accepted by Mr. De Morgan: and by their fruits ye shall know them. It is certainly a proof of the fair-mindedness of our novelist, that he has created orthodox believers like Lossie's husband and Athelstan Taylor, big wholesome fellows, both of them; and has deliberately made both so irresistibly attractive. The professional parson is often ridiculed in modern novels; it is worth noting that in this story the only important character in the whole work who combines intelligence with virtue is the Reverend Athelstan Taylor.
Seldom have any books shown so intimate a knowledge of the kingdom of this world and at the same time reflected with such radiance the kingdom of heaven. It is noteworthy and encouraging that a man who portrays with such humorous exactitude the things that are seen and temporal, should exhibit so firm a faith in the things that are unseen and eternal. In Joseph Vance we have the growth of the soul from an environment of poverty and crime to the loftiest heights of nobility and self-denial; and the theme in the Waldstein Sonata triumphantly repeats the confidence of Dr. Thorpe, who regards death not as a barrier, but as a gateway. In Alice-for-Short, the mystery of the spirit-world completely envelops the humdrum inconsistencies that form the daily round, the trivial task; this is seen perhaps not so much in the "ghosts," for they speak of the past; but the figure of old Verrinder—whose heart revolves about the Asylum like the planet around the sun—and the waking of old Jane from her long sleep, seem to symbolise the impotence of Time to quench the divine spark of Love. This story is called a "dichronism"; but it might have been called a dichroism, for from one viewpoint it reflects only the clouded colour of earth, and from another a celestial glory. In Somehow Good the ugliest tragedy takes its place in the unapparent order of life. It is not that good finally reigns in spite of evil; the final truth is that in some manner good is the very goal of ill. The agony of separation has tested the pure metal of character; and the fusion of two lives is made permanent in the frightful heat of awful pain. The fruit of a repulsive sin may be Beauty, like a flower springing from a dung-hill. "What became of the baby? … The baby—his baby—his horrible baby!" "Gerry darling! Gerry dearest! do think. … "
II
THOMAS HARDY
The father of Thomas Hardy wished his son to enter the church, and this object was the remote goal of his early education. At just what period in the boy's mental development Christianity took on the form of a meaningless fable, we shall perhaps never know; but after a time he ceased to have even the faith of a grain of mustard seed. This absence of religious belief has proved no obstacle to many another candidate for the Christian ministry, as every habitual church-goer knows; or as any son of Belial may discover for himself by merely reading the prospectus of summer schools of theology. There has, however, always been a certain cold, mathematical precision in Mr. Hardy's way of thought that would