Nigel Jackson is an Australian admirer of CM, who has written a number of texts on CM's work. As they are unlike any others, we have given him his own page. 

IN DERRY’S WOOD
Homage to Charles Morgan

                                 I
A spell of the future lights her sharp soul
As she enters the bridle-path; the bursting grass
In lush overgrowth of showered green denotes
A way not often trod.  Ahead, ocean
Of foliage, light-spattered, arching above,
Draws on her eye to the unknown places.
She moves in step like an oriental dancer,
And he is waiting by the stream as he must be,
Waiting for her to come, though he does not know
She comes, waiting in fallow time by the rippled
Plush and tricklery of mazy waterflow
For her to come as she must come and will.

                                    II
A path led here which began in puzzlement
And an uneasy expectation in the crowded
Rush of the town street, a curious state
Of vacancy from which she plunged at a venture
Into the steep arcade where books chattered
At her in their trays outside a shabby shop
And a man’s dark gaze fastened itself hard
With penetration on her, broke over her
Like night surf on a sheer beach of light,
And she knew her beauty and the uprushed joy
Of unequivocal love, as yet unnamed.
After she left, he asked one who she was,
Though her identity was plainly blazed
In the startled light of her awoken eyes.

                               III
It is time now.  Quickened by inner rain,
She has seized freedom, wildly shrugged off
Those others dead and is wondering at wordless songs,
Unsummoned, carolling in her alerted heart.
Easily she navigates the net of tracks to seek
The secret that she scents surely as the wood unfolds
And the whispering, pebbled brook takes her by the hand
Like a fairy child and leads her to his private bank
Under the ash tree, where the breeze fingers her cheeks
Questioningly and the approving sun mints
Discs of gold in the leaves above his head.
As he comes to her, a dappled light-and-shade
Plays about his feet and his keen, firm step.
She sees the white opal of his inner arm,
The muscle stretched, the taut bow of man,
The whole readiness of his unshaken soul,
And knows that she has come home into their legend
And found the correct page in the great book of life.

After Sparkenbroke

Defender of Art and Artists
Homage to Charles Morgan

On 6th February [2008] it will be fifty years since the English novelist, playwright, essayist and theatre critic, Charles Morgan, died.  He is an author whose works are so important that they should not be allowed to fall into oblivion, but should be preserved for posterity.  Why is this?
          One reason is the outstanding quality of the literary art which he produced.  Another is the sterling persistence with which he defended the integrity of art and the special role of the artist.  It is the latter aspect of his achievement which I look at today and find particularly well enshrined in the first piece of writing that I read by him long ago in late 1961 or very early 1962 in a collection of posthumous writings, The Writer and His World (1960) – it is also to be found in Liberties of the Mind (1951) : his W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture delivered on 18 April 1945 in the University of Glasgow and entitled ‘The Artist in the Community’. Regrettably, the succinct analysis to which I am today compelled will not be able to convey the delightful elegance, grace and graciousness of its composition.
          Morgan sought to explore ‘the artist’s place in a free community’ and argued that by preserving a true relationship between the two ‘we may help to safeguard the liberty of thought and the community of freedom itself, for an artist is neither the community’s priest nor its slave, but a member of it who holds in his especial charge certain qualities essential to its spiritual life.  He is the breath of the people’s imagination.’  Morgan felt that ‘the pressure of authoritarianism’, which he identified with totalitarianism (both nazi and communist) and ‘stiff, uniform chunks of fierce and frightened orthodoxy’ was ‘to be felt everywhere in the modern world’.  As defences against it he valued independence of judgement, resilience of imagination, conscience and a sense of compassionate justice within the individual person.  ‘It is the radical principle and the invariable practice of all totalitarian systems,’ he wrote, ‘to freeze imagination.  It is the radical principle of art to enable men and women to think and imagine for themselves.’
          Morgan began the body of his lecture by identifying something permanent in art.  He stated that ‘the impulse of art is holy and absolute as the impulse of love’ and saw it as ‘such an inward-feeling and outward-shining glory, such a “silence within the heart of a cry”, as you may see upon the face of Correggio’s Io in the moment of her visitation by the god.’ 
          By contrast, Morgan continued, ‘to mistake one supposed aspect of truth for Truth itself and so to imprison men’s curiosity and aspiration in the dungeon of an ideology, is the unforgivable sin against the spirit of man.’  He added that an artist ‘is bound by his vocation to recognize as sin the authoritarian’s claim to be a monopolist of truth.’  Morgan posed two important questions and provided the artist’s answer to them.  ‘By what means shall an artist enable men to imagine for themselves?’  ‘By communicating my own visions of truth.’  ‘What shall he enable them to imagine?’  ‘Aspects of truth.’
          Art, our writer pointed out, can cast a spell leading to ‘liberation, intensification, purification’ and ‘a walking clean through the looking-glass.’ Clearly he saw in art a power to enable people to raise their level of consciousness or to transform their very being.  This is done by a ‘breaking down of the compartments of the mind’, a transcending of individual separateness, an ‘inter-penetration of individuality, of time, of place’, which ‘sets the spirit free to go on its voyages’, liberated from ‘the chains of partial judgement and the blindness of close appearances.’ Under this spell we become ‘aware of the unity of the living with the dead’.  Morgan stressed that an artist ‘does not renew society’, but ‘enables men to renew themselves and so, in the long run, the society in which they live.’
          He did make a demand on the artist which some might question or see as contradicting his overall thesis: ‘the artist must value life in terms of Compassion, Beauty and Truth.’ Within this perspective, Morgan asserted that ‘what is important in an artist is his impregnating power’ and that ‘what is important in the community is its power to be impregnated and to re-present his vision in an eternal vitality and freshness.’  He identified this ‘fertilizing power’ as the essence of the work of art which results from ‘the aesthetic passion which the author pours into it.’
          This is why ‘we are not to dictate to an artist either subject or treatment.’  Morgan summed up his position as follows.  ‘All that matters is that the subject be one that awakes the artist’s aesthetic passion and that the harmony between subject and treatment be such that it casts a spell upon him, enabling him to be visited by his god, and so casts a spell on us, enabling us to be visited by ours.’  Some people might prefer to substitute ‘angel’ or ‘muse’ for ‘god’.
          ‘It is the function of art,’ Morgan concluded, ‘by its intensity to penetrate’ what he defined as ‘our incongruities, of time, of place, of individuality, of right seemingly opposed to right, of loyalty conflicting with loyalty’.  Its task is ‘to perceive some aspect of order in the chaos of living, some aspect of beauty in that order, some aspect of truth in that beauty, and so to distil experience that we are made partakers of its essence and are enabled to re-imagine it and to renew ourselves.’
          T. S. Eliot made a similar statement at the end of his 1951 essay ‘Poetry and Drama’: ‘For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther.’
          Morgan ended his lecture with a comparison of the artist with the teacher: ‘He whom we love and remember is… he who will pull the curtains away from the classroom window and let us see our own heaven with our own eyes.’
          At this time we should ask why the works of this great man are out of print and almost completely forgotten.  It may be largely a matter of fashion.  It may also be partly because his unequivocal defence of artistic integrity and the human freedom essential to it has challenged various powerful groups – ‘giants’ as fairy stories symbolize them – which rightly sense in his writings a mortal challenge to their present power or plans to increase that power.  Open the pages of, for example, his 1936 novel Sparkenbroke and read quietly and deeply the narrative of the first coming together of Piers and Mary in Chelmouth and Derry’s Wood.  There, you find as magnificent a reprise of the falling in love of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as you will find anywhere, together with a profound sense of the wyrd within which the destinies of human beings are mysteriously woven.  Then put the book down and make your own voyage into that world beyond the opened magic casements, the world that is ‘west beyond west’, that ‘other region’ or ‘far country’ of which so many artists have written, painted or sung, and which Jesus in his great story calls ‘the kingdom of heaven.’


Melbourne, 3rd February 2008 

Charles Morgan Remembered in Melbourne

9th February 2008 

Three days after the fiftieth anniversary of his death, English writer Charles Morgan was remembered and celebrated at a small luncheon in the Café Provincial in the bohemian inner suburb of Fitzroy, attended by twelve people.  The weather was suitably emblematic: it was a very gentle and serene afternoon with plenty of substantial clouds sailing peacefully through blue sky and the temperature about 20 degrees Celsius.  The venue was also appropriate to the occasion: secluded in the small private courtyard, surrounded by a wreathing coil of leafy vines, the guests dined in an almost al fresco condition, seated on small and humble outdoor chairs that might well have graced the ‘Cheval Pie’ in The Voyage, as Barbet perched and enjoyed the spirited singing of Thérèse Despreux.
          Who were these twelve folk who, in the face of the literary world’s erroneous forgetfulness of a great and gracious writer, had assembled to pay him homage?  From an hour and a half’s distance, in the provincial town of Ballarat, Rowan McIndoe, a jovial magistrate, and his wife Hellen (yes, with a double L) had driven down, while the convenor who writes this note and his own wife Helen, a singer and music teacher, had driven from the Dandenong rain forest on the eastern edges of Melbourne.  Manfred Frese, an able seaman originating from Hamburg, swapped anecdotes and wit with the devil-may-care ‘Spanner’ Parkes (a descendant of the famous ‘Father of Federation’).  At the other end of the table Paul Prentice, French teacher turned taxi driver, chattered volubly with the quieter and more sombre Don Webster, a retired English teacher recently qualified in natural therapies.  Youngest on the scene were up-and-coming accountant (or brewer) Lewis Jackson (son of the convenor) and his partner, Ella Baker-Wilson, whose calm mien our writer would have enjoyed describing in a well-crafted sentence or three.  Two substantial professionals filled out the number, Tom Bostock, semi-retired company lawyer and lifetime reader of Morgan, and Ian Rutherford, former deputy-headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School and wry observer of the human species. Regrettably unable to attend were Michael Collins Persse, well-known obituarist from Geelong Grammar School, owing to a heart attack, and Gary Robertson, polymath teacher, owing to his wedding anniversary happening on the day.
          A brief toast was drunk to Morgan in the pious hope that he and his works would still be remembered a hundred years hence and longer; and the members of the group then busied themselves sampling some excellent French and Italian cuisine, as well as Bacchic juices and cultivated conversation.  The occasion lasted for four and a half hours.

Nigel Jackson, 10th February, 2008 

The Thought of Charles Morgan
A review of Selected Letters of Charles Morgan, edited and with a memoir by Eiluned Lewis (Macmillan, London, 1967)

When, in 1949, he was elected a member of the Institut de France, Charles Morgan received an honour accorded by the French to only two men of letters from England in the half century previously – to Rudyard Kipling and T. S. Eliot. With Edgar Allan Poe he shares the curious distinction of having won a greater place in the heart of France than in the souls of his own countrymen.
     ‘I always feel that I have a better chance of being instantly understood by a French mind than by an English,’ he wrote to René Lalou, a distinguished French critic with whom he enjoyed friendship for over a quarter of a century. ‘The English refusal to count beforehand the cost of their emotions, their extraordinary habit of hoping for the best until the inevitable worst is upon them, their whole attitude towards women, their incapacity to find pleasure in art as such, their deadly reticence – all these things make me feel foreign among them.’
     Many schoolboys have heard of Winston Churchill’s famous speech of encouragement to occupied France during the Second World War. Few, if any, will have read the following words from Charles Morgan’s dedication in his novel The Voyage, written on July 23, 1940: ‘Tonight, the eve of Midsummer, there will be no bonfires on the hills of the Charente, but, though dark ages intervene, they will be re-lighted, for France is an idea necessary to civilisation and will live again when tyranny is spent.’ Later Morgan was to write a poem of homage, ‘Ode to France’, and an essay, ‘France is an Idea Necessary to Civilisation.’
     Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944. Some two months afterwards, Morgan was in the city for the re-opening of the Comédie Française, when his ‘Ode to France’ was read to the assembled company. He described the occasion in a letter to an old friend, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, the sister of Hilaire Belloc: ‘It was very exciting – the most exciting day of my life. I care desperately for French honour. The program consisted of poems of the Resistance – Claudel, Eluard, Vercors, &c. The National Guard in helmets and plumes. De Gaulle in the stage box….. My ode came last….. When I bowed to the audience I suddenly heard a noise like the wings of angels and then I saw that the whole audience of the Comédie Française had risen….. An Englishman can’t ask much more of life.’
     One day, perhaps, this event will be known to our English schoolboys, like the death of Byron at Missolonghi.
     Morgan achieved European fame with his novels, Portrait in a Mirror, The Fountain and Sparkenbroke. They deal, lucidly, with the great themes that occupied his life: the mysticism of love between man and woman, the life of the soul in contemplation, the search for spiritual renewal through single-mindedness, the meaning of death, and the paths that lead to the Kingdom of Heaven. The striking feature of his work is that restful yet joyous serenity which he admired in one of his masters, Turgenev.
     In his later years he came to be acutely aware of the ‘wave of spiritual evil passing over the world’, as Tennyson had described it. This theme predominates in his last essays and play The Burning Glass. To a Catholic friend he wrote in 1951: ‘Materialists, when they are Communists also, are conscious instruments of this evil. But many materialists who are not Communists but men of goodwill, are unconscious instruments of it. It seems to me to follow that all of us, who are not materialists, have become allies in spite of our own differences of doctrine.’
     Eiluned Lewis, author of the beautiful children’s book Dew on the Grass, and a long-time friend of Morgan, has collected in the present volume 160 letters and extracts from letters, out of the thousands which Morgan wrote. She explains: ‘Almost everything has been left out except that which concerns the writer at work – the habit of creative imagination, the manner in which it crystallised into stories and plays, the technique (even the physical technique) of his writing, and the philosophy of the writer’s life and task. The other exceptions are his love of France and his mysticism.’
     Her Memoir is filled with valuable and fascinating information, including details of Morgan’s connection with Australia (his parents were born in New South Wales). The book is typographically exquisite and is illustrated with ten photographs. From the whole emerges a clear image of an author who deserves comparison with Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence and Joyce.

Published in the National Civic Council’s News-Weekly in Melbourne, 22 July 1970       
     

A review of the Collected Poems

A Novelist Struggling in Verse

The Collected Poems of Charles Morgan, edited by Peter Holland (Scarthin Books, Cromford, Derbyshire DE4 3QF, England, UK, 2008, 12 pounds sterling plus postage and packing).

A ray of cultural and cultured hope has emerged from England with this superbly produced hardcover collection (in ‘Morgan green’) of the twenty-nine published poems of Charles Morgan (1894-1958) enterprisingly edited by a Quaker and former worker in the education service, now resident at Stone in Staffordshire.  The poems themselves are not Morgan’s greatest work.  His son, Roger Morgan CBE, notes in a brief foreword that ‘his major achievements are elsewhere in his novels, his plays and his essays; but the poems reveal much of the man: his idealism, his patriotism, his mysticism.’    

As Robert Graves several times explained, the Muse of Poetry is a goddess who must be wooed by nothing less than a complete dedication of the poet.  That dedication requires the yielding up of all kinds of attachments to the mundane world.  Morgan could do that in the best of his prose writings but almost never, it seems, found the key to such an arising in verse.  These poems are filled with admirable sentiments, but the Muse, alas, recoils if sentiments are, as it were, forced upon her; and these poems are fatally weighted by ongoing sententiousness.  As with Leo Tolstoy, the artist in Morgan engaged in a lifelong wrestle with the preacher and moralist. The artist won in his great novels, but largely lost in these poems.

Twenty of the poems are virtually juvenilia, for they were published between 1915 and 1920.  They exhibit a thoroughly competent handling of traditional metre and rhyme, with good control of pace but pedestrian diction with touches of stilted archaism.  For example, from ‘There Can Be No Content’, here are four lines with an autobiographical element:

     Sometimes the sluggard laughs from a comfortable place,
     Seeing the lifted head and the straining limbs whose load
     Cries for abandonment. But the traveller keeps the road,
     Still with his purpose sure and a firmer, quickened pace.

And here are the two opening stanzas of ‘Masthead and Star’:

     Never in life a woman knows
     The peace beyond the harbour bar,
     The spring of ships, the pride that flows
     Between a masthead and a star.

     Ever to her the sea is strange;
     Expectant of the land she goes;
     And all her dreams and visions range
     Between the desert and the rose.

If taken literally, these statements appear as hopelessly old-fashioned male chauvinism; but perhaps they should be understood as valid insight into two different approaches to the challenge of life, each usually but not always found in a particular sex.

The young Morgan could also bring into his verse an engaging conversational mode, as in the opening of ‘The Journey’:

      I swear to you there is no dearth
     Of warm affection in the earth
     Of English hills on a summer day,
     And I believe so kind a lover,
     When the summer days are over,
     Is something friendlier than they say.

     How I know it? It was thus
     We broke the bonds that lay on us…

What are the greatest successes in this collection?  Firstly there is a brilliant pastiche of Shakespeare in ‘A Tale of Sprites and Goblins’, being ‘Mamillius’s Tale, which he was about to tell Hermione in A Winter’s Tale’.  Here the genius of the great dramatist stirred a small flame in Morgan, as shown in the following excerpt:

                 Out of the dark a voice came clear:
     ‘Sir, I am she you seek, dead but unburied,
     Buried and yet alive. The world’s reversed,
     As in the mirror you shall find at last
     Set in the framing of your coffin-lid.
     And, as a sign that what is lost is found,
     What mourned is laughing, what obscure full-bright,
     I give you now, now that the year grows ancient,
     Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram;
     And marigold that goes to bed wi’ the sun,
     And with him rises weeping: these are flowers
     Of middle summer, and I think –

     Hermione
                                                             You speak
     Words that are not your own. The tale winds out
     Unto no ending. What’s the end of it?
     Mamillius
     The end – I see it now. Bend close your ear.

This playful piece is keenly attuned to the ‘feel’ of A Winter’s Tale and that particular moment in it; and it both evokes the genuinely eerie and temporarily enlivens Morgan’s diction.

Another touch of quality can be found in ‘Creed for a Child’.  Morgan himself had awoken early in childhood and found himself before adulthood to be something of a one-eyed man among the blind.  Thereafter he retained a deep sympathy for other children whose insights were unseen by grosser, though older, souls.  Here are the first and last stanzas:

     This is what I believe:
     That my whole duty is discovery;
     That, while I go what way great dreams have led
     Seeking in strength for new nobility
     Of limb and mind set free,
     My eyes should gaze ahead
     And shew fresh worlds to me…..

     May I be wise to love all men that sink
     Faint in the grass, or stronger walk the road;
     May I find dew to give to them for drink;
     And may some other come
     To carry on my load,
     When I at last go home.

There is a post-Tennyson simplicity there which is moving.

Another small success can be found in a comic genre that Morgan rarely stooped to: ‘Who is This Man the Coppers Seek’ is a bit of melodramatic fun serving as a review of a play:

     Who is this man the coppers seek
     And colleagues call the Boss,
     Who gives the slip to Armitage
     And double-crosses Cross?

     Beneath our Barney’s waterproof
     Is more than he concealed?
     If the steel door were once thrown back
     What truth would stand revealed?

The Muse is often kind to us in our unbuttoned moments when we have forgotten to take ourselves seriously.

Finally, mention should be made of the effective evocation of nostalgic sadness in the concluding poem for Morgan’s great novel A Breeze of Morning, ‘Final Retrospect’:

     When I was young, all lives but mine
     Were windows in a house of stone
     From which interior light did shine
             On me, outside, alone.

     My judgement, spellbound, did not speak:
     In awe, I loved to stand and stare,
     Through brilliant eye and glowing cheek,
             At spirits moving there…

Morgan’s most feted poem in his time, ‘Ode to France’, is a monumental failure, rarely if ever rising above bathos and, despite its words about the forgiveness of Jesus, descending into some nastily ugly abuse of Germany.  The venture was noble, but the inspiration totally lacking. Peter Holland, in commenting on the three public poems that conclude the volume (celebrating the newly acknowledged Queen Elizabeth II in February 1952, the life of Queen Mary (wife of King George V) and the life of Sir Winston Churchill), cheekily refers to their ‘touch of the poet-laureate manqué’; and ‘Ode to France’ is tarred with the same brush.

An extra value to this welcome publication is that it contains the first major bibliography of Morgan’s works in English.  This, together with Peter Holland’s introduction, adds to our knowledge of Morgan in many ways.  Your reviewer, for example, has learned that the eminent literary critic Derek Traversi (often linked to F. R. Leavis and his school) published an article on Morgan in Colosseum (Vol III, No II) in 1936, that Morgan never joined an established religion and that he turned down a knighthood in 1951, believing such an honour inappropriate for writers of literature.

There is also a moving obituary poem for Morgan, ‘In Memoriam’, by E. M. Almedingen and a chronology of the major events in Morgan’s life.

Charles Morgan wrote some of the noblest and most beautiful novels in English, works which should on no account be allowed to pass out of the national memory.  He was also, in his last years, a stalwart defender of human freedom, particularly from the tyranny of the modern state.  Peter Holland has performed a splendid service in producing, and producing so elegantly, this tribute to Morgan.

Nigel Jackson,
Melbourne,
28th April 2008 

(1,361 words) 

A RISING BLISS
Charles Morgan and his A Breeze of Morning

Of Welsh stock and with an English upbringing from parents both born in Australia, Charles Morgan (1894-1958) is currently [2004] the most unjustly neglected British novelist of the Twentieth Century. This essay will present a sketch of his life and then a detailed study of his 1951 novel A Breeze of Morning. Eiluned Lewis, author of the acclaimed children’s novel Dew on the Grass, published the Selected Letters with a memoir (Macmillan, 1967); and it is on this memoir that I have largely relied for information about Morgan’s life and works.
     Although he had wanted to be a writer from his earliest childhood, Morgan first sought a career in the Royal Navy (1907 to 1913) and spent most of World War One as a POW in Holland. From his naval experience came his first apprentice work, The Gunroom (1919), which created a minor sensation because of its exposure of the habitual mistreatment of junior officers in the Navy; it was unofficially suppressed, possibly as a result of influence from the Admiralty; but it resulted in significant reforms.
     Morgan’s experiences in Holland led to his most famous novel, The Fountain (1932), a long work largely devoted to the contemplative life, conveying ‘a brilliant lightness of spirit.’ Suffused with the thoughts of the 17th Century English mystics, it views life as an inward and secret experience of the truth that ‘within the apparent form of all things is another form.’ The Fountain also embodies Morgan’s lifelong interest in art, love and death as three aspects of the human impulse towards re-creation of the soul.
     During his imprisonment on parole, Morgan had met and been deeply influenced by a family of Dutch aristocrats, the van Pallandts. ‘Their timelessness would take my breath away,’ he said of them. He also gained at that time his intense love of France, mainly through conversations with the blind, 86 year-old Madame Loudon (née van Pallandt), through whom he lived imaginatively in France of the mid-Nineteenth Century. Julie, the heroine of The Fountain, is Morgan’s imagined portrait of her daughter, Helen, in youth. Helen, as he encountered her at Rosendaal Castle, was a witty, artistic, elegant widow who was well read in four languages. Morgan’s attachment to the ideal of a cultured European aristocracy took root in his two years of ‘time out’ (as he called it in an essay in his posthumous 1960 collection, The Writer and his World) among the van Pallandts and their circle. After taking a degree at Oxford, Morgan in 1922 became assistant drama critic for The Times and in 1926 principal drama critic.
     Meanwhile he had fallen in love (1920) with Mary Mond, the daughter of a tycoon; they became engaged, but Morgan was frozen out by Lady Mond. It was partly owing to these tempestuous experiences that he wrote his second apprentice work, the partly inspired and partly misconceived My Name is Legion (1925). In 1922 he met Hilda Vaughan, a Welsh novelist, whom he married in 1923. They had two children, Shirley (now Lady Anglesey) and Roger. Hilda outlived him by well over twenty years.
     A third novel, Portrait in a Mirror (1929), gave Morgan the breakthrough to public recognition he needed. Based partly on his own childhood and adolescence, it tells with exquisite lyric intensity and deep insight the tale of its young painter-hero, Nigel Frew, and his doomed love of Clare Sibright, a figure of similar ambiguous nature to Dostoyevsky’s heroine, Nastasya Philippovna, in The Idiot.
     One of its themes is that art is ‘news of reality’. At one stage Nigel reflects: ‘My mind leapt and sang; it was filled with a sense of renewal, of a flowering and impregnating wisdom not my own.’ The novel also gives a wonderful picture of life in a great British country house of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. A powerful influence in the novel is that of the Russian Romantic, Ivan Turgenev.
     Morgan followed the greater success of The Fountain with another very long novel, Sparkenbroke (1936). Eiluned Lewis regarded it as ‘in some ways the most autobiographical of all his novels.’ Its neo-Byronic hero, Lord Sparkenbroke [the last syllable of the name is pronounced ‘brook’], is an apparently amoral poet who in fact is filled with what the Welsh call hiraeth – longing. In this case it is a longing for self-transcendence through the death of self that happens during artistic creation, and also through physical death itself. Morgan had been influenced by his reading of Emily Bronte’s letters. He felt that she had experienced an overwhelming mystical love early in life and that ever afterwards she had longed to be freed from ‘the enclosure of life.’
     Sparkenbroke is a strange novel. It contains brilliant and profound sequences interspersed with ponderous and even pedestrian phases. It also has strange echoes of other great literary works of the time, as though Morgan’s sensitive soul was attuned to the souls of other contemporary artists. And it conveys the beauty of the countryside of southern England, its ancient and yet fresh feel, with superb ardour. At one stage there were plans to film the novel, but they were never realised, although in 1934 a film had been made of The Fountain. Morgan still awaits the cinematographic interpreter he deserves.
     In 1936 he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by France. He was also working on what I regard as his greatest novel, The Voyage, set in the Charente region of France, where lived his French translator, Madame Germaine Delamain. Morgan described the novel as ‘a fantasy about a fool of God’. Its hero, Barbet, has something in common with Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin from The Idiot. Eiluned Lewis considers Barbet the ‘happiest’ of all Morgan’s people: ‘a character with whom the author himself seems in love… a man in harmony with all living things.’
     Barbet was partly modelled on Madame Delamain’s husband Jacques, a French soldier of World War One who ‘had observed from his trench that the swallows were late that spring’, who was an almost saintly bird-watcher who ‘went very far into the interior of things’ and who wrote a successful book, Why Birds Sing. Eiluned Lewis notes that ‘a new freshness and freedom pervade the novel….. For a time a door opened for Charles (as it did for the novel’s heroine Thérèse whenever she was with Barbet) to “a natural and, because natural, a miraculous world.” Barbet’, she added, ‘who could perceive “innocence overlaid” and the essences of men “like birds and trees and night and morning” is “the touchstone of the book”.’
     The Voyage appeared in 1940. During the next six years or so Morgan experienced mixed success and failure. The short novel The Empty Room (1941) is generally regarded as a lapse from his standard, although in my view it still has significant beauties and merits. In 1942 he became an essayist for The Times under the by-line Menander’s Mirror. This led to the publication in 1944 and 1946 of two volumes of essays, Reflections in a Mirror (First and Second Series). Meanwhile, an ardent Francophile and admirer of General Charles de Gaulle, Morgan published articles in La France Libre and his name became potent among members of the French Resistance.
     In 1944 Morgan’s Ode to France, not an especially successful piece, for his métier was not verse, was read at the reopening of the Comédie Française after the liberation of Paris and received a standing ovation – a gratified Morgan listening from a box. For some reason Morgan’s writing tended to be more warmly received in France than in Britain. In 1949 he was elected a member of the Institut de France (only the second British novelist, after Rudyard Kipling, to be so honoured).
     In 1947 Morgan was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by St Andrew’s University and published one of his best loved novels, The Judge’s Story. Here we see in the protagonist, Judge Gascony, a character largely modelled on Morgan’s father, Sir Charles Morgan, a profound influence on his author-son. Sir Charles rose to be president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, lived well into his eighties and ‘remained the yardstick by which his son throughout his life measured a man’s integrity and application.’
     The Judge’s Story, Eiluned Lewis thought, ‘reflects Morgan’s innate puritanism’ – a strange comment to make about a champion of romantic love, including its erotic and sensual expressions, even to the point of defending adultery (as in The Fountain and Sparkenbroke, if not Portrait in a Mirror)! The novel also contains one of Morgan’s few portraits of an evil character. Severidge, like Blachère in The Voyage, is essentially evil in his cynicism, his sinning against the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.
     In 1949 came another novel with a partly French setting, The River Line. Its story deals with the smuggling of Allied servicemen out of Nazi-occupied France. The key character, ‘Heron’, Eiluned Lewis notes, ‘works for eternity’, ‘travels light with no baggage that violence can take away’ and ‘suffers loss without losing’. Like Barbet, he is a kind of saint, ‘able to absolve the guilt of others by his own acceptances.’ Some French critics thought that Morgan had over-romanticised the Resistance.
     Morgan throughout his life was a steadfast defender of human freedom and the right of artists to work entirely free of political constraints. His ‘fear of mass thought and the contemporary assault on the individual mind’ had been apparent in The Judge’s Story. He now published a magnificent book of essays, Liberties of the Mind (1951), which remains one of the best judgements on authoritarianism and totalitarianism ever composed.
     Then in 1952 came a theatre version of The River Line, with an appended essay ‘On Transcending the Age of Violence’, which ended with Mazzini’s words of 1849: ‘We must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.’ Morgan wrote two other full-length plays. The Flashing Stream (1938) weathered the Munich crisis in London and then held the stage in Paris for over a year after World War Two. A long essay ‘On Singleness of Mind’ was appended to this drama and proved to be not to the taste of some of his loyal admirers. The third play was The Burning Glass (1953) and, true to form, Morgan attached an essay to this, too, ‘On Power over Nature’. Henry Charles Duffin, who wrote the only book-length study of Morgan that has appeared in English, The Novels and Plays of Charles Morgan (Bowes & Bowes, London, 1959), considered The Burning Glass the best of the plays and a major work.
     Morgan’s best-selling (248, 000 or more copies) novel A Breeze of Morning came out in 1951 and will be considered in the second part of this essay. In 1953 Morgan was elected international president of P.E.N., for which writers’ organisation he toiled assiduously, possibly hastening his own death. In 1957 his final novel, Challenge to Venus, appeared. Eiluned Lewis describes it as ‘a disappointment’ and as ‘a tale of futile passion’ with ‘a flat ending’. Its hero, Martin Lyghe, she saw as ‘the opposite of Barbet’. I completely disagree. In my estimation the novel is composed with the same taut competence, brilliant character portraiture and richness of imagery as we find in A Breeze of Morning. It also contains astonishing correspondences with the world-famous Italian novel, The Leopard, which Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa was writing in Italy at the same time and (like Morgan) at the end of his life. Challenge to Venus is set in Italy and its heroine is an Italian aristocrat.
     By this stage Morgan’s vitality was ebbing. A large novel, provisionally entitled Darkness and Death, begun in 1949, had been put aside. Eiluned Lewis comments that Morgan was ‘becoming isolated, misprized by the younger writers and intellectuals of Britain.’ Henry Charles Duffin, who had previously published books on Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Wordsworth, Browning and the poet Walter de la Mare, was furious at the depreciation Morgan and his works received at the end of his life. He condemned ‘the studied neglect, in more recent years, of the critics’ and added that ‘the obituary notices were full of incredibly obtuse depreciation.’ The Times had said: ‘Readers of Mr Graham Greene, Mr Angus Wilson and the like had little patience with a view of life so obstinately elevated.’
     That comment, of course, gives the game away. Morgan was a man of remarkable goodness, joy and serenity. It is a commonplace that much of the art and the ‘art’ of the Twentieth Century has been obsessed with wickedness, misery, unquiet turbulence of soul and ugliness. That is why the greatest painter of that time, Andrew Wyeth, remains relatively neglected, while the inferior talent of Pablo Picasso, who frittered his gifts away on buffoonery and deceits, is promoted in his place. A profound revaluation is needed of the whole Western European cultural tradition, and I am confident that it will raise up Charles Morgan to his rightful place.
     He is not a novelist or playwright or essayist of the highest order. It would be silly to claim for him the stature of a Shakespeare or a Solzhenitsyn. However, he can justly be placed in the middle ranks of memorable writers as ‘the English Turgenev’. Fascinated all his life by romantic love and Platonic mysticism, he had at best an uneasy relationship with so-called Christian orthodoxy. A conservative liberal rather than a liberal conservative, he came, in his later years to be, like George Orwell, an emphatic opponent of all the modes of tyranny of the political Left. All of this means that he has had no big battalions barracking for him, and, I suspect, powerful forces behind the scenes interested in committing him to oblivion.
     Recently I wrote to a senior editor of Penguin Books suggesting that they should add some of Morgan’s works to their list. The reply was that, as with some other good writers of last century, ‘his star has set’ and there is insufficient public interest to warrant such a decision. That is a pragmatic response no doubt justified by current financial realities. I do not know what other ‘good writers’ the editor had in mind; but there is, for me, no doubt at all that Morgan’s entire work constitutes a treasure for the British people which should be preserved. Republication of Morgan should be a long-term cultural goal of British nationalists.

II

At the beginning of 1951 Morgan wrote to a friend about the new novel on which he was engaged. It was, he said, perhaps in a category with Portrait in a Mirror. Its date is 1906, and its subject a love story seen through the eyes of a scholarly and imaginative boy just old enough to fall in love himself (at a distance) with one of the grown-ups….. He is isolated by the fact of being so young, and resembles one who, walking in a dark garden, looks in through lighted windows into other people’s lives.’ The novel was A Breeze of Morning, which, within two years, had become Morgan’s most financially successful work.
     Henry Charles Duffin felt that ‘the whole novel is written in a prose that has the limpidity of a Corot landscape.’ Certainly it possesses a stunning sense of immediacy. One reason for this is that, as in Portrait in a Mirror, Morgan was drawing on his memory of the extraordinarily happy childhood he enjoyed (even though his mother had died when he was twelve). Through this remembrance we are taken back into a rural setting in southern England [Morgan was brought up in Kenley, Surrey] at a time when the British Empire was at its peak and an amazing pride and confidence filled the hearts of ordinary English people.
     For thirteen year-old David Harbrook, a precocious lover of the Greek and Latin classics who is the hero of the novel, this atmosphere of proud security is personally enhanced by his close relationship to his father (‘one of the leading railway engineers in England’) and his beloved older sister Ann (modelled on Morgan’s older sister Marcie).
     The whole novel is narrated by an older David, in his mid-fifties, who is a successful Classics professor at Oxford. He presents a vivid picture of his self-made father. ‘He had taught me by his hard work, his freedom from self-indulgence and his unswerving advance in his own profession as an engineer, to see the future as a huge ladder to be climbed step by step. To miss a rung was to be lost, perhaps to fall back forever into the company of the “n’er-do-weels”.’
     There is a wonderful episode in Chapter 19 when David shows splendid initiative in arranging the provision of emergency transport to take his father, currently at a neighbours’ dance, to the scene of a railway cutting collapse. We see the deep affection between the two and David’s determination to live up to his father’s high standards. ‘My purpose was to prove to my father that, in a crisis, I was neither a ‘head in air’ nor a schoolboy….. Never before had I pledged my father. To have done so gave me authority over the porter and over myself.’
     The curious mixture of maturity and boyishness in David that characterises him throughout the novel is beautifully captured as he hurries out to fetch his father. ‘There was a powerful moon, though an uncertain one, and I did not pause to light my bicycle lamp. The resolve to do without it was, I am afraid, not altogether the outcome of a rational calculation of the moon’s strength. In taking out my bicycle, I was taking out my horse. As I swept through the garden gate, my sabre did unquestionably clank.’
     His sister Ann is presented as a young woman of signal virtue and peace of soul. Plainly she has accepted a mothering role towards her younger sibling. In the postscript (Chapter 34) the older David comments: ‘My sister is the only person I have ever known whose mask and face have seemed to me identical. She is what she appears to be; she is undivided.’ Elsewhere, he recalls her effect on him as a troubled boy: ‘My love of her, of her purity of heart, came down upon me like a calm.’ Henry Charles Duffin astutely remarked that it was a masterstroke of Morgan’s to develop this brother-and-sister relationship as a foil to the main relationship in the novel, that between David and the eighteen year-old Rose Letterby.
     Another important character living in the Harbrook home is David’s older cousin, Howard Treladdin, an up-and-coming barrister. Morgan’s portrait of Howard is partly based on his memory of his own older brother Will, who was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. Orphaned and poor, Howard is protected and championed by Mr Harbrook, who expects great things of him. In the event, and after tribulations, Howard settles for the sort of ‘quiet life’ that Sir Thomas More advises Richard Rich to choose in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. This makes him the perfect mate for Ann, who has always loved him, despite his waywardness in the novel, caused by a feverish attraction to Rose Letterby.
     The character of David himself almost certainly gives us insight into Morgan’s own experience of his boyhood. This is characterised by two unusual features. The first is David’s strong sense of being already an adult, though in a boy’s body. He dislikes the follies of the school system, resents the sarcasm and bullying of his unfortunate classics teacher, Mr Libbett, and is well contrasted with his friend Tony Seaford, an athletically able young lad whose chief interest is in all the main ball games and general fooling about. It is easy to relate this characteristic of David to the adult Morgan’s hallmark solemnity, which at times in his writings, unfortunately, results in pomposity, preciousness and a yielding to the temptation to preach some message which, however valid it may be, damages the novel or play as a work of art.
     The other unusual feature of David is his capacity to ‘work his deep magics’, as he puts it when discussing it with Ann. He regularly turns up at the right place at the right moment. Thus he plays a vital role in the story at several points. Early in the novel he is walking home up Farthing Hill and finds himself in a strange state, a ‘condition of feeling time and place within me like the tremors of the blood’ which he knows is his ‘way of being released from my disguises.’ In that mood ‘anything was possible: that the homing rooks should leave silver lines engraved upon the air’ and ‘feeling, with a shudder of delight, that the spring air was dividing to let my face pass through it, and would close behind me when I was gone, like the sea in the wake of a ship.’
     He arrives outside Letterby Manor, whose ‘open gates… were clogged by rust; and over one of them ivy had entwined itself in the wrought iron, choking the heraldic lion of Mr Letterby’s crest, and throwing its tendrils up the brick gate-pillar to a mouldering stone ball at the summit.’ The depiction of this decaying mansion and its owner, now at the mercy of modern financial powers, provides a splendid symbol of the decay of the British upper class.
     Across Letterby Park there was an ancient public footpath, a right-of-way, which offered a quicker route home, but which, following his respectable and unpretentious father’s lead, David has never presumed to take. On this particular evening he suddenly knows he must take it, and he is right. In this sense, Morgan with profundity as well as skill is composing two stories in one: a realistic novel and a fairy story (a ‘legend’ as David calls such things). He is thus reminding the reader that the amazing truths of fairy stories, their beauties and wisdom, are not mere fantasy but a part of the warp and woof of human nature and experience.
     A graceful passage has David studying the façade of the Manor. ‘There was ground-mist now in the close meadows; the house itself, mounted on its invisible garden beyond the ha-ha, seemed to be afloat, and the crests of its near trees to be trunkless and rising. It was as though the house’s dimmed whiteness were about to dissolve in the pearly air….. A little cascade of music, so faint that I saw rather than heard it, rippled in the light and was gone….. It was as if crystal and crystal had touched in the dividing air.’ The music was being played by Rose. It also signalled to David, though he did not grasp it, that ‘the Goddess’ was about to enter his life.
     And it is at that moment that the Squire addresses David. ‘Mr Letterby at close quarters was astonishingly different from the legendary figure which stalked in and out of church but was not otherwise seen….. That he should be thrusting his lower lip out over my chess-problem was exceedingly odd; his ancestor on the Letterby tomb might as probably have come out of his stone armour and walked and talked.’ The Squire is a delightful old eccentric, with whom David rapidly forms a friendship based on a shared love of chess and of the beauties of classical literature.
     Partly as a result of his initiative and character, in not letting Mr Letterby just walk off with his chess-problem, David is ushered into the Squire’s den. ‘The chair I found was a soft, shabby continent of leather, long ago turned to the colour of reddish sand.’
     He again hears the sound of a piano. ‘Music came down to me again, a snatch of it, then a silence, then another snatch; it was as though a kitten were playing lazily with a tinkling ball. The sound was almost as thin as it had been when I was in the park, and I thought of it as coming from a solitary tower.’
     That is brilliant writing, which uses the music to represent Rose’s nature (it is she who is playing) and which also connotes the fairy story Rapunzel, an archetypal representation of the truth of the soul trapped in the human body. ‘Music came down from the tower… but it tailed away at the first difficulty and stopped.’ David will shortly see Rose for the first time, and, by falling in love with her, will alert her to the princess inside her, which, alas, she will never choose to become.
     Rose is soon the centre of attention of three very different lovers, Howard, David and ‘Matho’, Dick Featherford, who late in the novel becomes Lord Comberagh, upon the death of his father. Each lover offers a different kind of relationship. ‘Matho’ is the socially perfect match, but, though good-natured, will always be a clod and a cart-horse. Howard, with a possibly brilliant legal future but no money at present, loves Rose with an unhealthy, feverishly sensual passion, which a part of her returns; but they are never truly attuned to each other. David alone can offer true love and a true vision of her beauty, inner and outer in harmony; but he is too young – or so the novel, as well as Rose and David themselves, insists.
     Morgan must have felt uneasy about this, for he has the ageing David reflect upon it in the postscript. ‘I feel that, though not willingly or in my heart, I may have been guilty of injustice towards Rose of a special kind. The shield of a goddess is not a gentle burden to impose on any woman’s arm.’ He feels that his injustice arises ‘from my having, in the mood of over forty years ago, romanticised her too much and so laid her open to a charge of having failed to live up to claims which, in fact, she never made for herself.’ Her mundane consciousness, based on her everyday conception of herself, certainly more than once in the novel tried to brush David’s adoration aside – laughing off his ‘burning of incense’ and his looking at her ‘as though at a Grail.’
     However, her inner quality really was there, as David more than once insisted and as, in her heart of hearts, she knew. Rose, alas, was untrue to herself in the novel. She should have taken David’s love as her guiding light – regardless of whether or not this demanded that she ‘wait ten years’ for him. Morgan, in the postscript, fudges matters. Incredibly, he has David still unmarried forty years later. As though such an ardent soul would not have fallen in love again, after Rose, and soon!
     The novel is filled with exquisite renditions of the love-bond between David and Rose in a number of varied situations. One example must suffice, from the punting party in Chapter 22. ‘She pulled up her huge hat from where it was lying across her knees and covered both our faces with it. Her breathing lifted its brim; and how fast she was breathing! Light, penetrating the straw, drew needlepoints and thin lines upon her cheeks, as though a net of gold were spread over them. Within the tent were all the perfumes of Arabia….. If I had been Howard, she would have taken me in her arms.’
     Henry Charles Duffin was right to associate this novel with Portrait in a Mirror. ‘I do not think it can be doubted that this story is a revised version of that told in Portrait in a Mirror. For me also an improved version, one raised from darkness into light.’ I do not agree with Duffin’s depreciation of the earlier novel, which is also filled with inspired prose. However, Rose Letterby has so much in common with Clare Sibright, the earlier heroine, that it is hard not to believe that Morgan is recalling some real woman whom he loved but failed to win – Mary Mond, perhaps, or some now unknown ‘wild and whirling’ young beauty.
     Lost love, one of Turgenev’s great themes, is also one of Morgan’s – and has perennial appeal to mankind. It seems that such love-experiences involve a rousing within us of higher faculties of awareness, normally dormant. Unfortunately, in almost all cases, people fall out of love as easily and helplessly as they do in love. We suffer an expulsion from Eden. ‘Love lasts but three years and a day’, as the old saw has it.
     While in love we enjoy a taste of that Being-Consciousness-Bliss (Hindu, sat-chit-ananda) which is usually named in our culture as Heaven or Paradise. Morgan was assuredly especially sensitive to this state and, in A Breeze of Morning, he has incarnated it in union with a vivid re-creation of the innocence and freshness and bliss of youth, as experienced by a boy of more than ordinary sensibility. This leads to a number of outstanding passages of which I will provide two examples. The first comes from Chapter 14, which recounts a tennis party attended by David and Rose. His ‘deep magics’ work again.
     ‘I prayed all the gods of Olympus to guide the ball into her hands. And the gods knew their own. In triumph she flung it back at me faster than I would have believed possible, and, the gods being still merciful, I drew it down left-handed out of the air. Backwards and forwards the enchanted ball flew as it did one day long ago on the shore of the Phaeacians, until at last it went bounding away into the deep, and a thrush came to enquire of the ensuing silence.’
     Morgan continues on with an attempt to capture the junction of transience and eternity. ‘Upon the silences that follow lively activity, there is an accent of sadness. One hopes that the angels who pass are good angels, but is there not irony in their glance? The instant pleasure of being alive – the warmth of the sun, the flush of her cheek, the little hopping shadow of a thrush – intertwines itself with the living verities. Lyric and elegy are one. The shadow of her head is lengthened upon the grass. The thrush is gone. Hail and farewell!’
     And here is a lovely passage from Chapter 22’s account of the punting party in full midsummer: ‘Nothing is urgent. The thrust of spring and the retreats of autumn are far enough away; the season tells for a few days of nothing but itself, poised between memory and presage. Time loiters; the grass lies with open blade, a pliant greenness with unwrinkled edge. Seen through shallow water, when I looked over the edge of the punt, brown and blue pebbles had a gleam as crisp as the sound of bells on a frosty day, and when I leaned back again and gazed up at the empty, cooling sky, I forgot men and was happy.’
     In his effortless lifting up of such passages we can perceive that Morgan has made a uniquely beautiful contribution to the glorious pageant of English literature. It is astonishing that this is not properly recognised at the present time.

Part One first published by John Tyndall in Spearhead, UK, Number 419, January 2004, and then both parts in Heritage, published by The Australian League of Rights, Volume 28, Numbers 108-109, 2004.
     

LOVE AND ARTISTRY IN CHARLES MORGAN’S PORTRAIT IN A MIRROR

Such women remain ever new and ever unknown. A man’s curiosity about them never weakens, and their love never becomes for him ordinary, possible or explicable. There always remains in it an element of the miraculous and the impossible. – P. D. Ouspensky

This neo-Turgenevian novel earned Charles Morgan his first fame when it appeared in 1929. Like his later success, A Breeze of Morning (1951), it draws considerably, one feels, on his memories of his own boyhood, spent largely in Kenley, Surrey, in a comfortably off middle-class family presided over by a very successful professional man. In both novels the joys, sufferings and struggles of male adolescence are poignantly and profoundly presented and explored.
     The novel is Turgenevian in its size, its major theme of lost love and its gently elegiac tone. However, its plot (in which the protagonist, Nigel Frew, falls in love, is rejected and then becomes too late the object of love of the girl who passed him over, Clare Fullaton) is a gender-reversed echo of the main plot of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; while Clare’s fatal decision to choose the safe and socially approved option of marrying the young country squire, Ned Fullaton, instead of running away with Nigel, with whom, in her heart of hearts, she knows she is properly matched, echoes the equally disastrous choice of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights of Edgar Linton over Heathcliff. 
     Portrait in a Mirror is composed with an extraordinary freshness and immediacy, so that one feels rapidly and effortlessly a part of the three homes described in the novel, Drufford, Lisson and Windrush. Here is one piece of the outstanding description characteristic of the novel. Very nervously, Nigel is making his first visit to a country home of some social standing, but his painter’s eye is dominant: ‘…we swung into “the avenue”, a short, curving approach of polished gravel, bordered by two small plantations, one of which, in that first week in July, was an effective screen between garden and road. The smell was sweet and woody. A leaf fluttered on to my knees which, when I pressed it, stained my dog-skin gloves and gave out a scent as of smoke and violets, and I leaned out of the carriage to snatch, if I could, another leaf from some branch that had escaped the gardeners’ competent pruning.’ In his accounts of Lisson and Windrush, Morgan reveals a deep and abiding love for the lifestyle of the great country house, a mode of existence he knew well was passing gradually into history in the period in which the novel is set (1875 to 1879). Plainly Morgan mourns that loss, as Giuseppe di Lampedusa mourned in The Leopard with equal plangency the decay of the Sicilian aristocracy in the same period. Moreover, Morgan’s depiction of Windrush conveys his heartfelt love of the beauty and peace of English countryside, in this case located in an imaginary part of Herefordshire (close to the Wales from which Morgan drew some of his own ancestry), as well as his cherishing of rural tradition. His account of the late moments of a cricket game is a good example: ‘The shadows of distant elms stretched long arms towards the pitch, and the fieldsmen, about whose feet there appeared a thin, translucent haze, seemed to be standing ankle-deep in an emerald pool.’
     One important theme of the novel is the struggle of the great artist-to-be to realise his dream of successfully  pursuing his metier, a struggle bringing him inevitably into conflict with his bourgeois family and the aspirations for him of his down-to-earth, conservative father. Morgan, whose selection of detail generally in the novel is brilliant and most economically controlled, provides just as much characterisation of minor characters as is needed to expound with clarity the nature and significance of this struggle. All four members of Nigel’s family – his parents, his older brother and his sister (who is doomed to an Icarus-like fate, socially speaking, perhaps because she deferred too easily to the authority of class, instead of allowing her true self to bloom) – find it upsetting to realise that he is not as they are, that he is becoming a person who, in a sense, exists beyond their capacity of psychological sight. It is hard for him to oppose them, for they all love him; but his inner certainty is more than a match for their well-meaning but inappropriate blandishments.
     The communities presented as inhabiting Lisson, seat of the Trobeys, and Windrush, greater and more impressive seat of the Fullatons, are shown in general to be unable to grasp the nature of the artist’s soul as they brush against it in Nigel. Morgan cleverly counterpoints two important characters, one in each location, partly also to cast light on his other great theme of the vital importance of love and of being true to it. The invalid, Agatha Trobey, who feebly and hopelessly loves Nigel from afar, is cast as his psychological supporter at Lisson; she is also contrasted in that she is the artist of insignificant talent and vision, whereas he is the master-to-be who has both. At Windrush it is ‘the wreck’, the very aged great-aunt of Ned, Miss Fullaton, who is presented as a perceptive patroness who backs his ambition, while also representing the final disaster of the woman who, as a beauty in the years immediately after Waterloo, lived for sexual pleasure and glamour without, one assumes, ever having been touched by true love. The characterisation of both Agatha and Miss Fullaton is splendidly done.
     The related theme of the dependence of great art on  integrity in the artist is explored by Morgan largely through Ned’s father, the successful academician Henry Fullaton, who possesses superb technical powers as a painter, together with a vast knowledge of technicalities and art history, but who, alas, is a shallow man with little or no depth of artistic vision, of penetration beyond surfaces, whether of people or places. Henry Fullaton is a good man but a mediocre (although commercially successful) artist. Fortunately for Nigel, Fullaton has some degree of humility and awareness that he lacks something vital for the greatest art. Perceiving Nigel’s gift, he is not jealous but generously encourages him. Again Morgan provides a small but effective counterpoint in contrasting with Fullaton Nigel’s very first art teacher, Mr Doggin, who is shown as being of limited success as an artist but as not inauthentic. Nigel is shown as learning much from Henry Fullaton, both the positive (what the man has of strengths, particularly his technical and historical knowledge) and the negative ( the opportunity of seeing at close hand how disastrous for the production of great art is the combination of worldly success with lack of vision).
     Morgan also indicates Nigel’s very promising talent directly a number of times in the novel and most effectively. At Lisson Nigel tells Mr Trobey: ‘That light – the way it seems to swirl up from the trees as if the trees themselves were throwing it out – I wish I could paint that.’ Later that day he remarks boldly to Henry Fullaton: ‘The whole question is whether we can group light while we diffuse it, and, if it comes to portraits, then how we are to paint the mind and not the face only in terms of light.’ On another occasion he ponders how one might paint the reflection of roses in a tablecloth: ‘For here it was necessary, while borrowing colour from the reflected flower, to preserve the opaque whiteness of the reflecting surface and to suggest, beneath the stiff gloss, the texture and pliability of linen.’ When trying in vain to paint a portrait of Clare, he ‘hoped by [his] proposed method to obtain an inward glow which could not come from the direct application of opaque colour to canvas.’ Invited by Miss Fullaton to ‘paint the wreck’, Nigel meditates carefully: ‘Could I paint the woman who looked out still from those straining filmy eyes? Could I overlay impulse with experience, pleasure with its price, youth’s defiance of the world with age’s valiant enjoyment of it? ….. To show her as she was – unashamed but not shameless; to exhibit in her that rare product of worldliness, a cynic who is not a spiritual dullard – that would be my task… struggling for the texture of that plastered flesh and keeping her diamonds bright under the chin’s shadow.’ He tells Clare: ‘Every great portrait is a portrait of a whole life.’ The French art dealer, Jules Coutisson, a victim of drugs and pretensions of ‘modern art’, reluctantly praises Nigel’s work in powerful words: ‘You have a deeper knowledge of paint and draughtsmanship than comes from the schools….. your technical powers are altogether remarkable. You draw like an angel….. you have… the quality which… speaks to the souls of peasants after a picture has hung upon a wall three hundred years….. You belong to another age. Perhaps it is… an age that lies further in the future than I can see.’ 
     From all of this Morgan makes clear that the artist of genius needs a number of exceptional capabilities which he will deploy in concert. The American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), the greatest painter in the Western European tradition of the 20th Century, is the painter in reality that Morgan in Portrait in a Mirror describes in fictional terms.
     An even more important theme in the novel than the need for a developing artist to possess such capabilities, is its insistence on the very high importance in human relationships of love – of ‘true love’ or ‘romantic love’, as it is variously called in other places – the love that we associate with couples such as Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Yury Zhivago and Lara Antipova – to mention just a few.
     Probably the greatest achievement of the novel is its presentation of the young Nigel (he is seventeen at the time) meeting and falling in love with the beautiful, slightly older Clare Sibright – and in showing clearly and comprehensively the strange nature of the love experience itself. Turgenev devoted a whole novel to the theme of first love and called it First Love. Morgan’s account of the first meeting of Nigel and Clare is writing of exquisite beauty; and his subsequent analysis of the effects on Nigel (who, having fallen in love, soon knows the experience for what it is) and on Clare (who is initially shocked into a half-awareness that Nigel is more important to her than Ned, but, being already beguiled by the temptation to marry well, as ‘the world’ sees this, later fails to accept his bold invitation that she run away with him) is superbly accomplished in Chapter 2, ‘Lisson’.
     Earlier Morgan has prepared the way for the reader to appreciate the nature of Clare, by giving in the opening chapter the impression she has made some months earlier on Nigel’s older brother Richard, who met her at Oxford University: ‘She’s devilish lovely… like a Rossetti picture….. she laughs at the things that any other girl would think important – social things I mean… and all the little trifles… that one expects an amusin’ girl to chatter about. You never know when she’s laughing at you, or when she is suddenly going to be solemn as a judge about the oddest things.’ He tells how she abhors cruelty to horses and speaks against flirting because ‘it’s playing with love.’ Those were Clare’s words. Comments Richard: ‘You don’t know what it felt like when she said that – like being in church or something. Her eyes had tears in them that trickled over, … and she didn’t even try to wipe them away.’ He concludes his account by remarking, from his sober, middle-class, mundane perspective, that you ‘never know where you are with her.’ By this stage the reader recognises that Clare is an exceptional young woman, beautiful of soul as well as of body, a person who dares to be different, who is true to herself and allows ‘an original emphasis to break in’ to her social discourse, and is eager to meet her. Here, as at many other times, Morgan’s superb narrative touch leads to excellent literary structure.
     At times, indeed, his writing reveals (consciously rather than unconsciously, I believe) the ‘web of the wyrd’, the meaningful pattern within and behind our everyday lives which appears to be the product of some greater, living awareness. Sixty years before Danah Zorah could write her remarkable study of this pattern, The Quantum Self, Morgan had perceived it and wove insight into it in his mature novels. So, before he receives the momentous revelation of the Goddess (as Robert Graves would have put it) in Clare, Nigel has already entered a very special mood of heightened confidence: ‘…my imagining, whatever the nature of it, possessed me, so that there was no place in my mind for… any embarrassment or fear….. if I had been the last instead of the first to arrive I should in that mood have entered with an equal firmness….. The world… had flowered for me alone.’ This is all the result of his having immersed himself for a few minutes in his bedroom in the private world of his art-making.
     By a stroke of genius Morgan has Nigel, after he has entered the drawing room before (as he believes) anyone else, contemplate ‘a cross-stitch screen that shielded the empty grate’ on which is written the name of its maker, Hannah Kirk, and its date of composition sixty-seven years earlier. This arouses thoughts of mortality (shortly to be contrasted with intensity of life); it also means that he presents himself (unknowingly) to the watching Clare as a person of seriousness and self-command – something that would not have happened if he had been introduced to her in the normal way (when his shyness would have led to confusion and inarticulateness). 
     Morgan now shows Nigel to be in a state of perfect receptiveness for the revelation that is to come: ‘…though I was without definite anticipation of love, there was underlying all emotion a sense… of something shy and ardent and sacred that should be a spiritual epitome of all my secrets; of something delicious and aspiring, urgent, flamelike; above all, of something approaching so near that the breath of approach was upon me….. my soul lay open. I was as a deaf man in a wood of singing birds, awaiting a miracle….’ He feels that his spirit is ‘astride two worlds, as the mind is in the act of waking.’
He is about to undergo the same experience as Romeo undergoes at the Capulet ball, upon setting eyes for the first time upon Juliet. In both cases there is a reciprocal flow of very high quality emotion and awareness; and I would put it in Gurdjieffian terms as a shared shock in which each person’s higher emotional centre is activated by the other’s. 
     There is a fine touch of dramatic irony in Clare’s first words to Nigel: ‘So you’ve come to life at last! So you’ve really come to life at last!’ She is thinking of the unusual stillness with which he was staring at the screen; but we note the contrast with the theme of death the screen had aroused in Nigel’s mind, and we then link her words to Nigel’s immediately preceding thoughts about an incipient miracle which would give him new hearing. (‘Let those who have ears to hear, hear!’)
     It is wonderful the way Morgan at once evokes the joy of such a moment and does so, despite his infamously solemn decrying of the sense of humour later in the novel and elsewhere, by having Clare laugh and laugh at Nigel’s odd behaviour. Her laughter seems to instantly place him on a footing of intimacy with her which he does not lose for the rest of the conversation.
     The paragraph that follows, exquisitely written, is one of those moments in Morgan’s oeuvre which seems to express perfectly the essence of his soul and vision: ‘A trembling, not of surprise, but of wonder, shook me from head to foot. It seemed that I had known all my life that I should find her here, that I had dreamed a thousand dreams of drawing these curtains and feeling her laughter spring upon me from my own shadow.’ Again there is a clear intimation of the presence of the web of the wyrd, which involves quite a different sense of time from our usual one. Morgan’s language also connotes the pantheons of the ancient world: ‘…these gave her an ineffable air of speed, as if, drawn and suspended by high winds, she were driving a chariot across the sky and laughing as she passed.’
     A second description of Clare is part of the way in which Morgan does not merely state that Nigel has fallen in love, but shows it with rare literary grace: ‘She was shadowy as a ghost, rising out of the floor’s darkness like a faintly luminous mist, with no substance but in the lovely neck and arms and the graceful carrying of her head. Yet, how alive she was! With what an exquisite burning she charged my blood! All my being seemed to have its boundary in her eyes; all my knowledge and anticipation of beauty to be gathered up in her.’
     It is interesting to note that, although she is four years older than Nigel and perhaps, because she is girl to his boy, effectively six years more mature, Clare instinctively treats him as a partner on terms of equality: ‘She had spoken to me in a secret tone, had admitted me to her confidence: I might have been given the keys of heaven. As if a mysterious sorrow had been communicated to me by her and had become my own sorrow, I wanted to hide my face in her breast.’ She indeed has an inner sorrow, because she is moving towards agreeing to a mismatched engagement with Ned Fullaton which, in her depths, she knows to be a mistake, but which she lacks the strength to turn away from. Nigel has intuitively tuned in to this sadness. Then, Clare’s comment – ‘What a frightening person you are!’ – is both a compliment to him, because he has, in effect, psychologically mastered her, and an admission of her shock at suddenly being seen in a way ordinary admirers have never seen her.
     There are certain passages in English literature in which writers reach an extraordinary profundity and beauty with seemingly effortless ease. In verse I think of John Donne’s ‘Nocturnall on St Lucies Eve’; in prose, of Mary Webb’s account in Precious Bane of Prue Sarn’s ecstasy in the attic. Such treasures need to be acknowledged and especially cherished and thus preserved for the appreciation of future generations of readers. Nigel Frew’s meeting with Clare Sibright is one such passage; and it is astonishing that this author should be suffering still such inappropriate neglect over fifty years after his death. It is to be hoped that literary researchers in the future will be able to unearth the causes of this mysterious failure of perception – or of publication.
     Clare’s glorious liveliness is soon superbly presented, again with wit and humour, when she addresses Nigel at breakfast, after hearing Henry Fullaton announce that one day Nigel’s work will be more famous than his own: ‘Good morning, John the Baptist. If I weren’t so hungry, I’d sit at Mr Frew’s feet and sing the Magnificat.’ We can feel, beneath this cheeky and audacious outburst, her inner joy at being present with Nigel.
     Why then does the relationship of Nigel and Clare run aground, rather than reach fulfilment and the serenity of mutually attained love? The rest of the novel addresses this question.
     A part of Clare’s problem is that she is strongly attracted sexually to Ned Fullaton. Another part is that marriage with him and becoming of the mistress of Windrush would set her up for life in a wonderfully secure and luxurious style of existence. A third, perhaps, is that Clare initially sees Nigel as a youth rather than as a man. In this case there is a failure of imagination, possibly encouraged by the fact that she is used to being admired and courted by young men wherever she goes. She is aware that Nigel has awoken a ‘strange joy’ in her, but has not understood its full significance. Morgan gives a fine picture of her contradictory position: ‘She was evidently amused, and treated me with new favour and interest. And, in a dispute about height, she made me stretch my hands above my head and herself did likewise. Her finger-tips touched my palms; our bodies swayed to a light contact; she sprang away with eyes dancing.’ 
     Several times in the narrative Morgan shows the peculiar psychic link that comes into being with lovers of this intensity. At dinner Nigel imagines Clare taking him by the hand and walking away with him from everyone else. ‘At that instant she…looked down and across the table, as if someone had called her. She was puzzled; there was sadness in her expression, as though she could not find what she was driven to seek. I felt rather than saw her eyes’ discovery of mine.’ Her expression changes, ‘leaving a deep stillness of beauty that I never saw again. Her brows moved to a light questioning, the corners of her lips to a smile.’ It is not long before Clare has become fully aware that Nigel has fallen in love with her; and she has the sensibility to appreciate the significance of that affirmation, as well as to be grateful for it.
     She pays a tribute to the painter of genius she feels him to be and, at the same time, engages without fully realising what she is doing, in presenting herself before him to be loved and, even, possessed. Morgan then shows that the love experience harmonises easily with the artist’s will-to-create and love of the act of creating: ‘To achieve, to create visibly before the world, was an urgent need in me. I was filled with a passionate desire to paint her portrait – passionate, in all truth, for the desire had in it at that moment the hunger of a sexual passion. It was as an artist, not as a man, that I wanted then to possess her, and to possess, in her, beauty itself of which she had become representative. And as sexual longing, if not of a beast, falls back, submerged in worship, before the being loved, and the act of seizure becomes an act of aspiration, so, looking at her now as the being to be painted, I fell back before the mystery of her….. all my life I should be trying to paint what I saw in her and what was hidden in her – what I hadn’t yet the eyes to see.’ (It is Nigel as an old man, the first person narrator, who tells us this.)
     As his plot proceeds, Morgan contemplates the nature of the love experience and the similar experience of the artist’s love of creating: Nigel acquires ‘an impression of a world struck by magic, of summer scents and sounds and silences which took on, in those brief hours of enchantment, the meaning which even today is inseparable from them. Earth has never been so bright again, so free of limitation, so brimmed with adventure and the excitement of being alive….. it was all life, to love Clare and to draw her….. I had no being save as an artist and a lover. It was for me as if Clare and I dwelt already in a world within the world. I think I tasted then a little of the peace that á Kempis promises to the single-hearted.’ In short, these experiences fundamentally change a person’s life for the better in terms of psychological quality and bring him or her significantly closer to ‘the kingdom of heaven’, that state of sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) which Hinduism offers as the final goal of human endeavour.
     Nigel finds himself unable to paint Clare and unable to win her. In my view it is a dual failure – they are both responsible for it: a strong love-current runs between them, but it is not strong enough to give Clare the strength to break with the plan, held by her family as well as herself, to marry well into Windrush. Nigel is still too young and too immature to manifest sufficient strength of conviction and determination to ‘sweep her off her feet’ (as needs to be done); and Clare has not yet grasped fully the impact Nigel has made on her, thus being too confused to be able to act as decisively as she should. Her intimacy with Nigel has made her more aware than before that she is on the brink of a fatal mistake: she knows she is wronging the best part of herself, but she cannot pull back and lacks the vision to see that she should accept Nigel’s call. His boyishness, too, makes him seem to her female nature too fragile to trust herself to. Morgan as narrator has shown subtlety and precision in his story of this losing of a great opportunity.   
     From Chapter Three onwards the theme of an artist’s attempt to find his true way is intermingled with the love theme. Back home at Drufford Nigel has an important experience of self-revelation on Flock Hill: ‘The courage to create awoke in me; joy, a tide from earth and heaven, found me and swept me forward; a sweetness, like the sweetness of early morning at sea, hung on the breeze that lifted my hair….. I was identified with that day of sap and resurrection, and lay still with an emotion pouring from me which had in it the passion, but not the supplication, of prayer….. To this secret life, as if I had discovered a cloister of the creative spirit, I dedicated myself, and stayed unmoving in bliss.’ Later he notes that ‘it was a sense of proud and exalted solitude, a discovery of myself alone, which had cleansed me.’ In this state of personal renewal he makes the decision, in a spirit of tranquil self-assurance, that he will not go to Oxford, as his father wants – only to find that the web of the wyrd supports him, since his father has decided to encourage him to take up Henry Fullaton’s invitation to work with him in his studio at Windrush.
     The intermingled themes are developed very capably in Chapter 4, ‘Windrush’, when Nigel arrives, shortly after Clare and Ned have married. Inevitably the two lovers are drawn towards each other, but unfortunately a serpent enters the garden: sexual desire, which each feels for the other, more and more intensely, as time passes. At the same time the regrettable situation develops where Clare, although married, comes to realise that it is Nigel she loves, though she is joined to Ned, while Nigel finds that he can no longer love her as he did at Lisson, because her sexual desire for him, and his for her, has made her a different and a lesser person than the girl that he adored. Not only can he not love her as he did at Lisson, but his tainted relationship with her, he feels, threatens his integrity as an artist, so that eventually he flees Windrush rather than take Clare as his lover in the flesh.
     An important moment comes when Nigel is in the little Windrush church, looking at an ancient carving. ‘Then, gazing at the angel, I wondered to discover how little of the flesh it was, though beautiful in the flesh, and how it seemed less a body than a spirit made manifest in earthly form. Was the man who wrought it able so to regard women? Were they to him spirits awaiting their summons to a freer spirituality? In that faith an artist might indeed work in peace to the glory of God.’ There is no doubt that Nigel wishes also to practise a consecrated art. Yet sexual desire for Clare wells up in him at this very moment, something which he experiences almost as a curse upon his painting.
     The love-bond between them has not, however, died away. A few days later she comes unexpectedly to the church while he is there. As he watches her kneeling by the carving of the angel, he feels freed from his fear and thinks: ‘Why have I said that what I love is a ghost and vanished from the earth? She kneels there now as beautiful as the angel and as holy as she.’ When she asks why he stays alone in the church, he replies: ‘So that you might come to me as you have come, though I did not know it.’ This is a tribute to their love and an affirmation that it is part of something greater than them. Clare falls silent, transfigured. A mutual blessing has occurred.
     It is not long before he sees clearly that now she has fallen in love with him; and this is a blessing too: ‘I knew that, because she loved me and I felt her love about me like a cloak, I might go henceforward upon earth as a child without fear….. To be loved is to be made familiar with the spirits of natural things….. We seem to have been born but in the moment of our discovery of love, and to be running out anew from the arms of God, a part of his first creation….. is it not his timeless passion that has flamed within us?’ Unfortunately they cannot go back to where they were at Lisson. Clare at one stage actually talks to Nigel about what might have happened if they had run off together then. ‘Clare Sibright! It seems almost as if something that was mine had been stolen from me – never to be Clare Sibright again….. she was my first self… and is, sometimes, even now.’ In effect, she is aware that she made a dreadful error in joining her life with that of Ned; it was an act of self-betrayal. 
     Later still, just before Nigel flees Windrush, their love blossoms yet again: ‘When she rises she is a being of silver walking on the dark; when, as we go out, she speaks of the open air and the coolness of evening, the walls vanish, the grass is under our feet, and soon above us are the trees beside the lake throwing out faint odours of resin. Now I am afraid no more, nor is my heart divided….. There has been no need of words, for in our hearts all is acknowledged, and, though we speak, our minds are charged with expectations beyond our words….. And it seems, as her breast sways to me and my lips fall upon hers, that there lies upon them the sweetness that was in the beginning of the world. She is a girl and it is her girlhood that she confides to me, joining the springs of her life with mine.’ Alas, they cannot maintain this state, pure and uncontaminated. Sexual desire erupts in Nigel; he calls it by the uncomplimentary word ‘lust’; he sees it as making impossible a true renewal of the love they shared at Lisson; he sees it as a fatal destroyer of his artistic integrity and capacity to create; and thus he flees.
     Morgan hardly at all touches upon the other big question of whether or not it would have been right for them to commence an adulterous relationship. This omission is questionable: it is hard to believe that the matter would not have been at the forefront of the minds of both lovers and even discussed by them. Evidently Morgan did not want the shadow of that controversy to fall over the tale he wished to tell. This is one reason why he has kept Ned a very shadowy character – though a more likeable man, in my judgment, than Henry Charles Duffin allowed.
     After three years overseas Nigel returns to Drufford, where, in contrast to his own, the lives of Ethel and Richard are withering. He has focused only on his work and begun to win a reputation. He has enjoyed an ‘extraordinary seclusion’ and ‘sense of inward peace’ as a result of breaking free from the world of his boyhood and youth. Thinking that Clare and Ned are in Norway, he accepts the urging of Agatha to revisit Lisson; but, as he seals his letter of acceptance, a premonition hits him: ‘emotion caused my hand to tremble and a tingling to pass through my body – a seizure of joy and hunger and undefined expectation; above all, of self-commitment, of having taken a step that could never be recalled.’ Once again love has attuned him to the web of the wyrd, for Clare will turn up unexpectedly at Lisson after all.
     The lovers have only to exchange one look and each knows that they will physically consummate their love at the first opportunity. Morgan sees them as under a mutual spell of sensuality. He presents a wonderful image of Clare readying herself for embrace: ‘Looking up into the branches, she lifted her arms above her head, and I saw how her breasts were raised and tightened by the movement and how her body swayed from the feet. Seeing my gaze upon her and interpreting it, she did not smile, but looked steadily at me like some delicate fawn that gazes out upon a passer-by from the dark places of a thicket. So beautiful was she…that at first I dared not move; but, though her lips were still and pale, her eyes were unflinching and denied me nothing.’
     It may be asked whether Morgan is not contradictory in his detailing of the subsequent night of physical love and its significance. For example, he has the narrator, the elderly Nigel, report: ‘I felt an infinite tenderness towards her yet wished to escape; I felt love, even that peace of heart which is love’s rarest gift, yet there were spurs urging me to be gone. Nothing in my life, I knew, would ever be more joyful than these moments while my head was propped on my fist and cool air touched my forearm….. Here were finality and content….. Gaze on, gaze on, hear her slow breath…’
     Yet at the same time Morgan claims that the whole episode is a failure. He asserts that the lovers ‘passed through the valley of passion’ and were mutually ‘lost in darkness’, with the contemplative spirit ‘broken by lust’s opportunity’. He depicts them as ‘a youth, pierced through and through by the idea of female nakedness, captured by his imagining, and a girl, whipped by vanity and desire, writing for herself a falsely romantic chapter in her life.’ Clare has engaged in ‘a vain striving to rediscover love’s first pattern, by her rejected.’
     I am not so sure about all this. Morgan’s invocation of the web of the wyrd on several occasions, together with the ways in which he has described their great love throughout the novel, make me doubt whether such a love could be corrupted and lost in the way he claims. He also suggests that Nigel never attained a similar love with anyone else in later life, a possibility that I think would have been most unlikely for a man of such positive nature and gifted sensibility.
     Notwithstanding these misgivings, it must be admitted that Morgan at the last minute does try to salvage something positive from the wreck of this relationship: ‘Her desire had been the spirit’s unending desire to be remade. She had longed to re-create herself in the image of the girl I had loved – to be that girl, to give her to me….. She would accompany me always, she would command my brush, inhabit my spirit, stir ghostly in the bed of whatever love might come.’ He has Clare seeming to Nigel to say: ‘Believe that I am she you loved, that it is her hair that covers you, that these are her hands in yours. You loved her in the spirit, not in the flesh. You created her in the spirit; you could not possess her in the flesh. Create her continually. Do not let her die. Be in her always…’ And Morgan has Clare actually say: ‘The girl you loved has not escaped or betrayed you….. When I am here no more, she will remain with you.’
     The great question about this novel for the critic, then, is: how far has Morgan convinced us of the credibility of the development of this relationship – or how well has he explored it? My impression is that he faltered here. There is no doubt that mutual love (romantic or ‘true’ love) is a fundamentally different and superior phenomenon for human beings than mutual sexual desire. Morgan is sound about that. However, the reader may doubt whether he has convincingly shown that the love relationship between Clare and Nigel could be so spoiled, as he claims it was, by mutual sexual appetite and their eventual yielding (for one night only) to it.
     There is also a nagging suspicion that Morgan is in two minds about the value of mutual sexual desire, both approving it as a wonderful pleasure, but condemning it as ‘lust’. We all know that love and sexual desire are often mixed in human intercourse, in varying degrees and combinations; but there may be something a little crude and simplistic in the way Morgan handles that in this novel. Certainly his language about sex is at times disappointingly ponderous and precious. And his recourse to the language of the sacred to describe the great love of Nigel and Clare, while thoroughly justified by the phenomenon itself, may not always be fully accurate or appropriately fresh.
     He does not delve deeply or originally into the nature and purpose of the love phenomenon. Perhaps he might have done so if he had been able to make contact with a traditional teaching other than that of orthodox Christianity – with Sufism or Taoism, for example. The purpose of sexual pleasure is obvious and undisputed: it is to encourage the coupling which continues the race. It is not so clear what the nature and purpose is of the love that a Romeo feels for a Juliet. It may be intended by Nature to facilitate quality couplings on a higher level and with an appropriate sequel in high quality offspring; but it may also be quite other – to open the doors of perception and ‘make the dead live’. There is an age-old testimony that people often do not know what to do with their love – and an equally pervasive testimony that, sooner or later, people fall out of love without volition, just as they earlier fell in love, also without volition. Morgan touches on the baffling nature of such love when he has the narrating Nigel remark: ‘To spiritual love there is no outlet in action. It is a cloistered ecstasy; and in such an ecstasy I was now living.’
     One other observation should be made, and this is that Morgan, as was sometimes the case in his novels, could not resist at times getting into the pulpit (it would be too vulgar to describe it as mounting his soapbox) and sermonising on topics dear to his heart. In Portrait in a Mirror, these interludes or indulgences are sometimes successful, sometimes not. At their worst they have a heaviness which is off-putting to the contemporary reader.
     The most successful is the famous statement about art: ‘Once fairly launched upon an imagined picture, I had a foretaste of that highest joy of an artist – a shutting out of conflicting impulses, a complete isolation of spirit….. Art is news of reality, not to be expressed in other terms. In this sense an artist is a messenger of the gods, and for this reason cannot explain their message in a tongue other than his own….. The experience itself, and that it is of reality, is not by him to be mistaken. It may be isolated and final, like the falling of the seed from which a plant springs, or, like rain, be continually renewed upon him. In each case, his joy of it, ordinarily called creative, is a receptive joy; there is a close analogy in the feminine act of love, which is at once fierce and peaceful, a fulfilment and an initiation….. The power to be impregnated, and not the writing of poems, the painting of pictures, or the composition of music, is the essence of art, the being an artist….. even in his childhood, while as yet he scarcely knows what it is to be a craftsman, an artist is wholly subject to it, and sees in it the riches of his life.’ Portrait in a Mirror gives life to this manifesto in the ways in which it celebrates the high quality of living implicit in both romantic love and artistic creation.
     Less successful is Morgan’s attempt to isolate the essential nature of the understanding possessed by the Jesus of the Gospels: ‘From his power to see children in men sprang that unique quality in Christ’s judgment which was not what we call justice nor what we call mercy….. And it is this power of imagination which, if an artist possess it, separates him from other men so that they can see nothing from his point of view….. They are not…the givers of truth….. A great artist perceives beneath all concealments that innocency of life which is the only background capable of exhibiting the truth of pain, of joy, of each human experience….. Portraying the flesh, he discovers the origin and the journey of the soul.’
     Jesus is more than ‘a great artist’; he is, literally, the tao, ‘the way, the truth and the life’, the figure who most completely joins heaven and earth, the divine and the human. An artist receives flashes of truth; Jesus is truth. It would be interesting to know if Morgan ever read P. D. Ouspensky’s chapter ‘Christianity and the New Testament’ in A New Model of the Universe (the book from which this essay takes its epigraph) or Maurice Nicoll’s books The New Man and The Mark – and, if so, what he thought of them. Certainly Morgan felt a repugnance for aspects of orthodox Christianity which made it difficult for him to explore the world of the sacred, notwithstanding his love of parts of the Bible and Christian liturgy. I support his heterodoxy, but feel that he could have explored it more deeply than he did. 

Melbourne, December 19th 2012