Problem Piece

THE JUDGE'S STORY (184 pp.)--Charles Morgan--Macmillan ($3).

Most of Charles Morgan's novels (The Fountain, Sparkenbroke, The Voyage) start out with a fair wind but eventually become becalmed on a sea of pretentious ideas. In The Judge's Story, Morgan shunts his characters around to illustrate a problem which is too big for them, and too big for his novel: ". . . The problem . . . of how, in the modern world, to remain civilized and free."

The story is a modern contest between good & evil, with Morgan acting as a kind of celestial scorekeeper. The chief character is a retired judge who is writing a book about Athens during its best days. A saintly Mr. Chips wrestling with the devil instead of the Lower Form, he prays nightly for help in his work ("God, make me fit to write"), seeks, in his historical research, a "timeless common humanity" to unite Greek ideals with the wearier 20th Century. What he finds, at first, is a modern tempter with a fat bankroll and a skinny conscience, who tries to bribe him away from his book.

Author Morgan's villain buys men's integrity along with their learning, then tries to destroy their creativeness. "The vast ambition of his plan [was] to guide the development of men's minds, to collectivize art and scholarship, to harness them to industry." Like Faust, the judge sells his soul, later redeems it by shucking off his possessions and leading an ascetic life. To prove his point--that individual integrity can defeat collective evil--Author Morgan shamelessly stacks the cards on the side of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

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