Among the Books

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21557, 20 January 1940, Page 10

Among the Books

Potter and Novelist

WILLIAM DE MORGAN CENTENARY ,

r\N November 16, 1837, William de Morgan was born in Gower i, Street; he died in 1917, having lived I. through nearly four-filths of the ! astonishing century which Victoria’s 1 reign began, and during which the , whole face of civilisation was j changed by scientific invention. He, < too, was an inventor, albeit a some- 1 what impatient one, but he did not . love the changes which invention . brought about, writes a contributor 1 in The Tinies Literary Supplement. * His youth and middle age wore . devoted first to art and then to ( craftsmanship, and only when, after I ' a long and gallant struggle, ill-health I ' and financial stringency brought his career as a potter to a close did he I ’ open his eyes to what had been * happening while he worked to men and women, their ways of life, dress, appliances and habits. As he said to < a friend (the quotation is from Mrs ] A. M. W. Stirling’s biography):- < I have blundered into the wrong generation. I belong entirely to the Dickens period of life and literature. I read greedily when Pickwick was ( up-to-date, and when all the world was as Dickens drew it. Afterwards I plunged into an active life in which every moment of my life was absorbed by art, by chemical problems or mechanical inventions, and for forty years I scarcely looked in a book unless it was about pots or ; mechanisms. When I turned to literature I took it up exactly J where I had left off—the interregnum did not exist for me. But It was not only books that he had been too busy to read; it was the lace of life itself which this benevolent, impetuous, ingenious but not extremely practical artist and craftsman had hardly scanned between the days of the sixties, when he struck up his close friendship with Burne-Jones and his circle, and the close of the century

when, though married in a perfect union, he realised that he was a lorn survivor of that* notable band. This strange break of continuity was, in fact, a godsend, for without it he could not have attained that candid freshness of view in retrospect which, as it appeared in Joseph Vance, immediately swept a large public off their feet, enabling the soothsayer’s prophecy to be fulfilled that he would attain world-wide fame only late in life. Possibly, after all, his achievement as a potter may prove more durable than his novels; for undoubtedly, as a ceramist, he was a master, while as a novelist he was not. Nevertheless, it is not here that the centenary of an inspired potter’s birth would most fitly be celebrated: our business is with the author of Joseph Vance, Alice-for-Short, Somehow Good and other successful books, whose production, and rich rewards were crowded into the last twelve years of his life. The story of the chance which opened up this new and successful phase in William de Morgan’s life was once too commonly known to need repetition; but some dust has settled upon his memory since then, and ’t may well be recalled. Some time before 1901 he had written two chapters of a novel about a “grubby little boy.” It was put away in a drawer, was accidentally taken to Florence, where he regularly spent th? winter, and was later rescued from the wastepaper basket by his wife who bided her time. One day, as Mrs Stirling relates:— De Morgan was ill in bed. suffering ostensibly from influenza, but principally from the unwonted idleness which filled him with depression and sapped his vitality. Evelyn took the piece of manuscript to him and laid it by his bedside, with a pencil temptingly adjacent. “I think something might be made of this,” she said briefly. When she looked in softly half an hour later he had started on the occupation which he was never again to abandon, and was writing rapidly.

So Joseph Vance was finished in 1904 ’ typed, submitted to a publisher, re-, jectcd and finally forced by one | I enthusiastic publisher on another I reluctant publisher in 1905, and came out in 1906 to astonish author and i I publisher by the acclamation with which it was received. The rest was I easy, for William de Morgan had a‘ vast storehouse of material in his. benevolent memory and a highly powered inventiveness to supply I connecting incident. He never ran I dry, and death overtook him in the | composition of The Old Man's Youth, ' a title which as one critic has remarked. might stand for the inspira- ■ tion of all his literary work. Joseph Vance, as Professor Phelps observed, cut ri"ht across the literary current of its day. which was the day of Henry James’s last magnificence, I when Mr Shaw, Mr Wells, G. K. I Chesterton. Mr Belloc and Arnold | Bennett were in their prime, and I when the forces of Liberalism, rich , in promise of every type of social I progress, were on the verge of, triumph. Of what it felt like to be , then a young man dedicated to letters Mr Frank Swinnerton has given a | glowing account; and it is not to be supposed that the immediate success of William de Morgan’s first novel had much effect upon that band of enthusiasts. Naturally, the things which interested him had little interest for them. Nevertheless, though it appealed more particularly to those whose fighting days were over and who had themselves some part to sentimentalise, Joseph Vance deserved its unexpected acclamation. Even to-day, wnich seems to differ es much from 1906 as 1906 did from 1860, one can take that excellent, rambling story from the shelf and become immersed in it, at all events so long as Christopher Vance remains in existence. Comparisons Vain To compare William de Morgan the novelist with Dickens, Thackeray, or. indeed, any other writer of note is, surely, a waste of time. Certain affinities are there obviously enough, particularly with Dickens, the favourite author of his youth. Great writers are consumed by an inner fire, as was William de Morgan the potter; but in William de Morgan the novelist this fire is not felt, but only a pleasant glow compounded of vivid memory and a peculiarly attractive character. In- ! deed, the personality of William de I Morgan saturates the best parts of i all his novels, while other parts of I I them are cold and even preposterous 1

WHAT LONDON IS READING STORY OF CHRIST Jewish Writer’s Novel MOUNTAINEERING M.P. ’ (Specially written for "The Timaru Herald ” by Charles Pilgrim.) LONDON. December 21. i GRE A I work recently published • is Sholein Ascii s The Nazarene (Routledge), which has been trans- ’ laled from the original Yiddish by Maurice Samuel. This is, as would appear from its title, a retelling of the story of (Juist from three | different points of view: from that lof Cornelius, Roman Hegemon of i in proportion to its degree of absence, i Therefore, for his first novel, he instinctively chose the right approach. I that of a lonely old man in a dreary London lodging looking back on enchanting pictures of a happier past, I when those whom he had loved—his j father and mother, Lossie, Janey and j Dr Thorpe—peopled a frorld of which ' grime dimmed no brightness and pure | humour redeemed even drunkenness ; and incompetence. Here, under an- | other guise, was the world of his own youth, of Professor de Morgan, that I amiable sage, of the brothers and I high-spirited sisters in whose image his pert and golden-hearted young women were surely modelled, of duets for flute and piano, and the Waldstein sonata heard through an open window, of good works by high-minded women in low quarters, and of the amazing characters revealed in London’s horrible slums. I They were not very extraordinary experiences or memories for a man of his generation; but what enabled him to give them their particular colour of life in art was a certain happy combination of qualities in his own character. This, used by his creative impulse over an old and simple model, produced in Joseph Vance something approaching a masterpiece of its kind. The imprint of personality stares out of every page no less clearly than from a portrait of the author, with its broad, domed forehead, its determined brow, its delicate but be ;ky nose and its sensitive mouth. It is not that of an exuberant genius, of a reflective intellect, still less of a satirist; but of one in whose mind, after a life of independent action and multifarious contacts, love, laughter and sympathy had not been dimmed, while their i mellow ray projected, with amazing I accuracy of outline, figures of the past on to the screen of memory.

Jerusalem, and friend of Pilate; of Judas Iscariot: and finally of Joseph, a young pupil of Nicodemus. These three tales are completely difi ferent in character. That of Vornelius is cool and cynical, the tale of ane who had for a time come under Christ’s spell, resisted Him. and is now the most bitter of His enemies. The Gospel of Iscariot is burning with passionate love and zeal for the cause of Christ’s kingdom on earth; that of Joseph is the tale of a scholar, kindly and tolerant, like his master. Nicodemus. The accounts are set in a modern framework, as the narrator, who is a penniless Jewish scholar, helps the Polish Catholic scholar. Viadomsky, to translate his mysterious manuscripts. But it gradually appears that Pan Viadomsky is either a reincarnation or a survival of Cornelius, who stood at the loot of the Cross, and gave Jesus vinegar to drink. Though the book is rather heavily overloaded in places with scholarship, it is full of illuminating remarks and passages. It is especially interesting in the fact of its Yiddish origin. Christianity in Tibet It is strange that Christians should have to go to a non-Christian community to find the Christian way of life really lived. There have been, of course, and there still arc saints in the history of Christianity, who have really lived according to Christ’s principles, but in this machine-made, mass-pro-duced age of ours it seems we have to go to Tibet to see Christianity lived—by Buddhist lamas. We saw this in the play and film Lost Horizon, and we now see it again in Peaks and Lamas by Marco Pallis (Cassell). Mr Pallis set out in 1933 to scale the high peaks of the Ganges-Sa tie j watershed, and while doing so he met the monks of a Tibetan monastery. He was greatly impressed by the Buddhist religion and set out to study it. The

■ erenlty of Buddhism is what especially appeals to people to-day. The contrast between it and the noise and hurry of the outer world is so marked. The central point of this contemplative

religion is compassion, which is closely related to Christian charity, but which seems to be practised to a greater degree among those of the Buddhist faith, than among many of those who are nominally Christians. Here is a valuable exposition of a most interesting religion, though we must add that the cure for the evils of the modern world is not completely found in leaving it. Outside the Cave Mr L. S. Amery. M.P. says in his preface to Days of Fresh Air (Jarrolds) that civilised man like primitive man is for all practical purposes a cavedweller, but since he is by inclination a lover of the open air, hetakes most of his pleasures outside the cave. This book is concerned wholly with these fresh air activities. From early years Mr Amery has been interested in mountains. He is an expert climber, and his mountain experiences have taken him into the Alps, the Dolomites, the South African Drakensberg. and the Canadian Rookies. As Minister for the Dominions he visited many parts of the Empire, including Canada. South Africa. Australia and New Zealand, and in all of th a m he found occasions for outdoor sport. At the age of 25 he was sent by The Times as war correspondent to South Africa, where he tried to report f or the Boer side, but in this he was unsuccessful. He has interesting incidents to relate during this war. in which Mr Winston Churchill became a prisoner of war. and he himself escaped—by missing a train! He has also some pointed things to say of the British Generals during the South African campaign, Kitchener. Roberts. French and Haig, especially pointed in view of the experiences of the British army in the Great War that followed. Recalling the Past R. H. Mottram’s new book Miss Lovington (Hutchinson) is yet one more example of the author’s ability to recreate Victorian England. It is the story of an elderly headmistress who, accompanied by an aged family retainer, and a youthful great-niece, returns to the village of her youth, and the scene of her early, and unfortunate, love affair. Coincidence seems to set the staging of Milestones by the local dramatic society during Miss Lavington’s stay in the village. She meets Edward, the son of her old lover, dressed in clothes almost identical with those his father was wearing when she remembered him. Romance is supplied by Edward and her greatniece Catherine. But the real charm of the novel lies in Mr Mottram’s power of drawing back from the past the very essence of its atmosphere. For this alone it would be well worth reading. Romantic Heroine Magdalen Kng-Hall, the sister of Commander Stephen King-Hall, is already known to the reading public for Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, a most entrancing book of its kind. She has now followed this up with another excursion into the eighteenth century. Lady Sarah (Peter Davies) is the

story of Lady Sarah Lennox, the fascinating daughter of the second Duke of Richmond, and a great granddaughter of Charles 11. Lady Sarah early attracted the attention of royalty, in the person of George 11, as a child in Kensington Gardens, and a little later she attracted the attentions of the future George HI. He was, however, destined for his German wife, and Lady Sarah merried a dull East Anglican Squire. An elopement with a Gordon cousin was followed by a divorce which was a cause cel°bre, and a second marriage to George Napier, the father of a line of famous soldiers. Lady Sarah is a romantic heroine, and this Is an enchanting novel which has the backing of history.