Charles Morgan
Charles Langbridge Morgan was a playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom (The Voyage, The River Line), through passionate love seen from within (Portrait in a Mirror) and without (A Breeze of Morning), to the conflict of good and evil (The Judge's Story) and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke).
Morgan was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913. On the outbreak of war he was sent with Churchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain.
He married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in 1923.
He was the drama critic of The Times from the 1920s until 1938, and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. His first play, The Flashing Stream (1938), had successful runs in London and Paris but was not well received in New York. The River Line (1952) was originally written as a novel in 1949 and concerned the activities of escaped British prisoners of war in France.
He was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1936, a promotion in 1945, and was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1949. From 1953 he was the president of International PEN.
While Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime and was awarded the 1940 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he was sometimes criticised for excessive seriousness, and for some time rather neglected; he once claimed that the "sense of humour by which we are ruled avoids emotion and vision and grandeur of spirit as a weevil avoids the sun. It has banished tragedy from our theatre, eloquence from our debates, glory from our years of peace, splendour from our wars..." The character Gerard Challis in Stella Gibbons's Westwood is thought to be a caricature of him.
“There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.”
“As knowledge increases, wonder deepens.”
“It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable,and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. Theywill not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learnto ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.”
“All enchantments die; only cowards die with them.”
“As knowledge increases, wonder deepens. (Thanks Joe P. for the quote)”