Charles Langbridge Morgan

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Charles Langbridge Morgan (1894 - 1958) was an English playwright and novelist.

He is known for the quote "One cannot shut ones eyes to things not seen with eyes". Some of his early poems were published in The Westminster Gazette. "To America",1917,was included in "A Treasury of World Poetry", edited by George Herbert Clarke. He married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in [[1923] by whom he had two children, Shirley, Marchioness of Anglesey and Roger, Librarian of the House of Lords. He was the dramatic critic of The Times, from the 1920s until 1938 and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. He wrote a series of articles for the Times Literary Supplement under the byline "Menander's Mirror" from 1942 and many articles to The Sunday Times.

He was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served a Midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913 when he returned to England to take the entrance examinations for Oxford. On the outbreak of war he rejoined the navy but was sent with Chuchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel "The Fountain."

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 in World War II.

He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1936 in which he was promoted in 1945, and was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1949. From 1953 he was the international president of P.E.N.

While Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime, he was often criticised for excessive seriousness, and is now rather neglected as a result; 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.

The main themes of his work were romantic love, mysticism, and a longing for the timeless and sublime through telling the stories of idealistic and artistic protagonists.