Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest when
they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's _Letters and
Literary Remains_ for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham
merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather
mystical novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did
not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there is something to make one
shudder in the very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been
reassuring to know that these remains were for the most part short
essays and stories read at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay
Society of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such a club are not a
source to which one would naturally look for exhilarating literature,
yet from them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a volume both
interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthouse contributed to these meetings
for some twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he withdrew to
concentrate his energies upon _John Inglesant_, and it is worthy of
notice that his early sketches are, on the whole, better work than the
more elaborate essays, such as that on _The Platonism of Wordsworth_,
which followed the production of his masterpiece. He was to an
extraordinary degree _homo unius libri_, almost of a single thought, and
there is a certain freshness in his immature presentation of that idea
which was lost after it once received the stamp of definitive
expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for his
later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies
the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first
sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I
have been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure
of my own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when
Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years,
and shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his
literary kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne
is the fact that he seems from the first to have possessed a native
sense of style; what other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In
the earliest of these sketches the cadenced rhythms of _John Inglesant_
are already present, lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance
that came later, but still unmistakable. And at times--in _The Autumn
Walk_, for instance, with its "attempt to find language for nameless
sights and voices," in _Sundays at the Seaside_, with their benediction
of outpoured light upon the waters, offering to the beholder as it were
the sacrament of beauty, or in the _Recollections of a London
Church_,--at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost or
discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the
_Recollections_, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more
than a boy--might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier
himself?--
Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom
I have never seen, whom I knew so little of, should haunt me thus.
Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the
dark and dingy houses round about; and as with the small
congregation I listened to the refrain of that sublime litany
which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought
it all the more divine because I knew so certainly that in her
days of trouble and affliction it had supported and comforted her:
By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy
precious death and burial; by Thy glorious resurrection and
ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver
us.
And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is decidedly more
interesting than might have been expected. The narrative is simply told,
and the letters are for the most part quiet expositions of the idea that
dominated the writer's mind. Here and there comes the gracious record of
some day of shimmering lights among the Welsh hills;--"a wonderful
vision of sea and great mountains in a pale white mist trembling into
blue," as he writes to Mr. Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we are with
the author of _John Inglesant_. Joseph Henry Shorthouse was born in
Birmingham on September 9th, 1834. His parents belonged to the Society
of Friends, and the boy's first schooling was at the house of a lady who
belonged to the same body. He was, however, of an extremely sensitive
and timid disposition, and even the excitement of this homelike school
affected him deplorably. "I have now," says his wife, "the old copy of
Lindley Murray's spelling book which he used there. His mother saw, to
her dismay, when she heard him repeat the few small words of his lesson,
that his face worked painfully, and his little nervous fingers had worn
away the bottom edges of his book, and that he was beginning to
stammer." He was immediately taken from school, but the affection of
stammering remained with him through life and cut him off from much
active intercourse with the world. He acknowledged that without it he
would probably never have found time for his studies and productive
work, and the eloquence of his pen was due in part to the lameness of
his tongue. At a later date he went for a while to Tottenham College,
but his real education he got from tutors and still more from his own
insatiable love of books.
It appears that all his family associations were of a kind to foster the
peculiar talents that were to bring him fame. His father while dressing
used to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so imbued him with a
love for that wonderful country which he himself was never to see. In
after years, when the elder Shorthouse came to read his son's novel, he
was surprised and delighted to find the scenes he had described all
written out with extraordinary accuracy. Even more beneficial was the
influence of his grandmother, Rebecca Shorthouse, and her home at
Moseley, where every Thursday young Henry and his four girl cousins, the
Southalls, used to foregather and spend the day. One of the cousins has
left a record of this garden estate and of these weekly visits which
might have been written by Shorthouse himself, so illuminated is it with
that subdued radiance which rests upon all his works. I could wish it
were permissible to quote at even greater length from these pages, for
they are the best possible preparation for an understanding of _John
Inglesant_:
The old house at Moseley ... was surrounded by a large extent of
garden ground and ample lawns. The gardens were on different
levels--the upper was the flower garden. No gardener with his
dozens of bedding plants molested that fragrant solitude, but
there, unhindered, the narcissus multiplied into sheets of bloom,
the little yellow rose embodied the summer sunshine, the white
roses climbed into the old apple trees, or looked out from the
depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet-briar was there, though
we saw it not.
Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden,
surrounded by brick lichen-covered walls, beyond which rose banks
of trees. [The "blue door" in this garden wall is introduced in
the _Countess Eve_, and another part of the garden in _Sir
Percival_.] On these old walls nectarines, peaches, and apricots
ripened in the August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden
stretched a winding lawn, made in the shape of a letter S, and
surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a complete seclusion.
In the broad light of noon, when the lilacs and laburnums and
guelder-roses were full of bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly
burnished, reflected the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious
solitude, where we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts'
content. But as night fell, when "the laurels' pattering talk was
over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, and in its
stillness and loneliness.
_Qualis ab incepto!_ Are we not in fancy carried straightway to that
scene where the boy Inglesant goes back to his first schoolmaster, whom
he finds sitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvellous things
concerning the search for the Divine Light? or to that other scene,
where he talks with Dr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, and hears
that rare Platonist discourse on the glories of the visible world,
saying: "I am in fact '_Incola coeli in terra_,' an inhabitant of
paradise and heaven upon earth; and I may soberly confess that
sometimes, walking abroad after my studies, I have been almost mad with
pleasure,--the effect of nature upon my soul having been inexpressibly
ravishing, and beyond what I can convey to you." Indeed, not only _John
Inglesant_, but all of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could not be better
described than as a writing out at large of the wistful memory of that
time when men heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day--and were still not afraid. But we must not pass on
without observing the more individual traits of the boy noted down in
the record:
That which strikes one most in recalling our intercourse with our
cousin at this time is that our conversation did not consist of
commonplaces; we talked for hours on literary subjects, or, if
persons were under discussion, they were such as had a real
interest; the books we were reading were the chief theme. The low
garden was generally the scene of these conversations, and it was
here we read and talked all through the long summer afternoons ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne had a perennial charm,--his influence on our
cousin was permanent,--and we turned from all other books to
Hawthorne's with fresh delight. There is in existence a well-worn
copy of the _Twice-Told Tales_ that was seldom out of our hands.
[It is in the Preface to this book that Hawthorne boasts of being
"the obscurest man of letters in America."]....
Our cousin was at this and all other times very particular about
his dress and appearance; it seemed to us then that he assumed a
certain exaggeration with regard to them; we did not understand
how consistent it all was with his idea of life....
He was not at all fond of walking, and it is doubtful if he cared
for mountain scenery for its own sake. He responded to the moods
of Nature with a sensitiveness that was natural to him, but it was
her quiet aspects which most affected him. He was a native of "the
land where it is always afternoon."
But life was not all play with young Shorthouse. At the age of sixteen
his father took him into the chemical works which had been founded by
the great-grandfather, and, although his father and later his brother
were indulgent to him in many ways, the best of his energies went to
this business until within a few years of his death. There is something
incongruous, as has been remarked, in the manufacture of vitriol and the
writing of mystical novels. In 1857 he married Sarah Scott, whom he had
known for a number of years, and the young couple took a house in
Edgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in which they had both grown up and
where they continued to live until the end. Mrs. Shorthouse tells of the
disposition of his hours. He went regularly to business at nine, came
home to dinner in the middle of the day, and returned to town till
nearly seven. The evenings, after the first hour of relaxation, were
mostly devoted to studying Greek, reading classics and divinity, and the
seventeenth-century literature, which had always possessed a peculiar
fascination for him. During the years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly
putting together his story of _John Inglesant_, and with the exception
of his wife, no one saw the writing, or, indeed, knew that he had a work
of any such magnitude on hand. For four years he kept the completed
manuscript, which was rejected by one or two publishers, and then, in
1880, he printed an edition of a hundred copies for private
distribution. One of these fell into the hands of Mrs. Humphry Ward,
and through her the Macmillans became interested in the book, and
requested to publish it. No one was more amazed at the reception of the
story than was the author himself. He was immediately a man of mark, and
the doors of the world were thrown open to him. Other stories followed,
beautiful in thought and expression, but too manifestly little more in
substance than pale reflections of his one great book; his message
needed no repetition. He died in 1903, beloved and honoured by all who
knew him, and it is characteristic of the man that during his last years
of suffering one or another of the volumes of _John Inglesant_ was
always at his side, a comfort and a consoling voice to the author as it
had been to so many other readers.
Religion was the supreme reality for him as a boy, and as a man nearing
the hidden goal. His family were Quakers, but in 1861 he and his wife
became members of the Church of England, and it was under the influence
of that faith his books were written. Naturally his letters and the
record of his life have much to say of religious matters, but in one
respect they are disappointing. It would have been interesting to know a
little more precisely the nature of his views and the steps by which he
passed from one form of belief to the other. That the anxiety attendant
on the change cost him heavily and for a while broke down his health, we
know, and from his published writings it is easy to conjecture the
underlying cause of the change, but the more human aspect of the
struggle he underwent is still left obscure.
Nor is his relation to the three-cornered embroglio within the Church
itself anywhere set forth in detail. Almost it would seem as if he dwelt
in some charmed corner of the fold into which the reverberations of
those terrific words _Broad_ and _High_ and _Low_ penetrated only as a
subdued muttering. To supplement this defect I have myself been reading
some of the literature of that contest, and among other things a series
of able papers on _Le Mouvement Ritualiste dans l'Eglise Anglicane_,
which M. Paul Thureau-Dangin has just published in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. The impression left on my own mind has been in the highest
degree contradictory and exasperating. One labours incessantly to know
what all this tumult is about, and I should suppose that no more
inveterate and vicious display of parochialism was ever enacted in this
world. To pass from these disputes to the religious conflict that was
going on in France at the same time is to learn in a striking way the
difference between words and ideas; and even our own pet transcendental
hubbub in Concord is in comparison with the Oxford debate vast and
cosmopolitan in significance. The intrusion of a single idea into that
mad logomachy would have been a phenomenon more appalling than the
appearance of a naked body in a London drawing-room, and it is not
without its amusing side that one of Newman's associates is said to have
dreaded "the preponderance of intellect among the elements of character
and as a guide of life" in that perplexed apologist. Ideas are not
conspicuous anywhere in English literature, least of all in its
religious books, and often one is inclined to extend Bagehot's cynical
pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencies here, too: the stupidity of the
English is the salvation of their literature as well as of their
politics. For it is only fair to add that this ecclesiastical battle, if
paltry in abstract thought, was rich in human character and in a certain
obstinate perception of the validity of traditional forms; it was at
bottom a contest over the position of the Church in the intricate
hierarchy of society, and pure religion was the least important factor
under consideration.
Two impulses, which were in reality one, were at the origin of the
movement. Religion had lagged behind the rest of life in that impetuous
awakening of the imagination which had come with the opening of the
nineteenth century; it retained all the dryness and lifeless cant of the
preceding generation, which had marked about the lowest stage of British
formalism. Enthusiasm of any sort was more feared than sin. Perhaps the
first widely recognized sign of change was the publication, in 1827, of
Keble's _Christian Year_, although the "Advertisement" to that famous
book showed no promise of a startling revolution. "Next to a sound rule
of faith," said the author, "there is nothing of so much consequence as
a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion"; and
certainly, to one who reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobriety seems
to have marked them for her own. Yet their effect was undoubtedly to
import into the Church and into the contemplation of churchmen something
of that enthusiasm, trained now and subdued to authority, which had been
the possession of infidels and sectaries.
What sudden blaze of song
Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven?
In waves of light it thrills along,
The angelic signal given--
"Glory to God!" from yonder central fire
Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir;--
such words men read in the hymn for _Christmas Day_, and they were
thrilled to think that the imaginative glow, which for a score of years
had burned in the secular poets, was at last impressed into the service
of the sanctuary.
Another impulse, more definite in its nature, was the shock of the
reform bill. In his _Apologia_, Cardinal Newman, looking back to the
early days of the Tractarian Movement, declared that "the vital question
was, How were we to keep the Church from being Liberalised?" and in his
eyes the sermon preached by Keble, July 14, 1833, on the subject of
_National Apostasy_, was the first sounding of the battle cry. Impelled
by the fear of the new democratic tendencies, which threatened to lay
hold of the Church and to use it for utilitarian ends, the leaders of
the opposition sought to go back beyond the ordinances of the
Reformation, and to emphasise the close relation of the present forms of
worship with those of the first Christian centuries; against the
invasions of the civil government they raised the notion of the Church
universal and one. The first of the famous Tracts, dated September 9,
1833, puts the question frankly:
Should the Government and the Country so far forget their God as
to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and
substance, _on what_ will you rest the claim of respect and
attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been
upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your
connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must
Christ's ministers depend?
A layman might reply simply, _On the truth_, and Shorthouse, as we shall
see, had such an answer to make, though couched in more circuitous
language. But not so the Tract:
I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is
built--OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.
That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which united the claims of
the imagination with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical
development led the way to Rome. In the Church at large, the new leaven
worked its way slowly and confusedly, but in the end it created a
tripartite division, which threatened for a while to bring the whole
establishment down in ruins. The first of these, the High Church, is
indeed essentially a continuation, and to a certain extent a
vulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. What had been a kind of epicurean
vision of holy things, reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made the
vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautiful rites of the ancient worship
were a powerful seduction to wean the rich from worldly living and no
less a tangible compensation for the poor and outcast. At a later date,
under the stress of persecution, the leaders of the party formulated the
so-called Six Points on which they made a final stand: (1) The eastward
position; (2) the eucharistic vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water
mingled with the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavened bread; (6)
incense--without these there was no worship; barely, if at all,
salvation. The Low Church was, in large part, a state of pure hostility
to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was loudly Protestant,
confining the virtue of religion to an acceptance of the dogmas of the
Reformation, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the imagination, and
finding the truth too often in what was merely opposition to Rome.
Contrary to both, and despised by both, was the Broad Church, which held
the sacraments so lightly that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined
in communion with Unitarians, and which treated dogma so cavalierly
that, with Maurice, it thought a subscription to the Thirty-nine
Articles the quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot see that
this boasted freedom did much more than introduce a kind of license in
the interpretation of words; it transferred the field of battle from
forms to formulae.
From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it
possessed its giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the
English language. I have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly,
yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects of the controversy, because only
as the result of a profound and, in many respects, violent national
upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of _John Inglesant_ be
comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it
would appear from her record that the noise of the dispute reached her
husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of composition he was
dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw of the Oratory,
where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal Newman resided,
having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts to authority.
The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through which he had
come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was during
these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High
were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the
banners of the English Church Union and the Church Association. The
activity of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express
purpose of "putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from
the fact that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some
$250,000 for the sake of attacking High Church clergymen through the
processes of law. Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution
Company limited.
Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of argument--Laud himself had
aforetime made such an attempt--to regard the Battle of the Churches as
a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialism is due to the
fact that it was concerned, not with the truth, but with what men had
held to be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able to write a book which
is in a way the direct fruit of this conflict, and which still contains
so much of the universal aspect of religion, came, I think, from his
early Quaker training and from his Greek philosophy. It would be a
mistake to suppose that, on entering the Church of England, he closed in
his own breast the door to that inner sanctuary of listening silence,
the _innocuae silentia vitae_, where he had been taught to worship as a
child. At the time of the change he could still write to one who was
distressed at his decision: "I grant that Friends, at their
commencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the most important truth
of this system, the indwelling of the Divine Word." In reality, there
was no "perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence to this principle,
both before and after his conversion; only he would place a new emphasis
on the word "indwelling." The step signified to him, as I read his life,
a transition from the religion of the conscience to that of the
imagination, from morality to spiritual vision. This voice, which the
Quakers heard in their own hearts alone, and which was an admonition to
separate themselves from all the false splendours of the world, he now
heard from stream and flowering meadow and from the decorum of courtly
society, bidding him make beautiful his life, as well as holy.
Henceforth he could say that "all history is nothing but the relation of
this great effort--the struggle of the divine principle to enter into
human life." And in the same letter in which these words occur--an
extraordinary epistle to Matthew Arnold, asking him to embody the
writer's ideas in an essay--he extends his Quaker inheritance so far as
to make it a cloak for humour, a humour, as he says, in "a sense beyond,
perhaps, that in which it ever has been understood, but which, it may
be, it is reserved to _you_ to reveal to men." One would like to have
Mr. Arnold's reply to this divagation on _Don Quixote_. Mr. Shorthouse
had, characteristically, adapted the book to his own spiritual needs as
a representation "of the struggles of the divine principle to enter
into the everyday details of human life."
It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to George Fox and to Plato
which preserved Mr. Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement while
permitting him to be faithful to the Church. In the Introduction to the
Life an ecclesiastical friend distinguishes him from the partisan
schools as a "Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confess in general to a
strong dislike for these technical phrases, which always savour a little
of an evasion of realities, and bear about the same relation to actual
human experience as do the pigeonholes of a lawyer's desk; but in this
case the words have a useful brevity. They show how he had been able to
take the best from all sides of the controversy and to weld these
elements into harmony with the philosophy of his inheritance and
education. The position of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of the
Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanising tendencies and his
distrust of priestcraft, but he differed from them still more
essentially in his recognition of the imagination as equally potent with
the moral sense in the upbuilding of character. To the Broad-Churchman
he was united chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One of his
few published papers (reprinted in the Life) is a plea for _The Agnostic
at Church_,--a plea which may still be taken to heart by those troubled
doubters who are held aloof by the dogmas of Christianity, yet regret
their lonely isolation from the religious aspirations of the community:
There is, however, one principle which underlies all church
worship with which he [the agnostic] cannot fail to sympathise,
with which he cannot fail to be in harmony--the sacramental
principle. For this is the great underlying principle of life, by
which the commonest and dullest incidents, the most unattractive
sights, the crowded streets and unlovely masses of people, become
instinct with a delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become the
"outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."
Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in heart.... Kneeling in
company with his fellows, even if all recollection of a far-away
past, with its childhood's faith and fancies, has faded from his
mind, it is impossible but that some effect of sympathy, some
magic chord and thrill of sweetness, should mollify and refresh
his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that consciousness of
intellect which, natural and laudable in itself, may perhaps be
felt by him at moments to be his greatest snare.
But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a
culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely
masses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice
than for the brotherhood of charity or the association of men in good
works. In his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he
differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as
the equal foes of religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its
historic symbolism and its national acceptance, and needed not, or
scarcely needed, the ministration of the priest. He thus extended the
meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism.
"This sunshine upon the grass," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance
and of love." When, in his early days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's
lovely Devonshire home, there arose in his mind a poignant strife
between his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. In a stanza
composed for a lady's autograph album he gave this expression to his
hesitancy:
There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.
'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,
With unattached and lonely step to rove
O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot.
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.
No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse
during his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited
Church as the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their
approach to God, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on
the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he
saw it at the altar table.
If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker
mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church
too narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that
Plato possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in
reality a mere extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what
appears to be the last letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his
hands were already clasped in those of beneficent Death), he avowed his
creed: "That Image after which we were created--the Divine
Intellect--must surely be able to respond to the Divine call. The
greatest advance which has ever been made was the teaching, originally
by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be very glad to
see this idea of _John Inglesant_ worked out by an intelligent critic."
Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in its
response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer
worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth
as lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in which we
are actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century,
attempted to give to the crude passions of men or the transient pomp of
earth a power intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed
that these might be made by faith to become as it were an illusory and
transparent veil through which the visionary eye could penetrate to the
mystic reality.
For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his
religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it
seemed to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to
trouble the hearts of Englishmen, but in nobler and more romantic forms.
There was, in fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle
of Puritan, Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the
quarrel of his own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born
in a family of Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds
one not a little of Father Holt in _Henry Esmond_, is put in charge of
the boy and trains him up to be an intermediary between the Church of
England and the Church of Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in
a state of suspense between the faiths, and the inner and real drama of
the book is the contest in Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate
debt to Rome has been fulfilled, between the two forms of worship.
In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to
Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the
King was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a
good deal of dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his
brother by the Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at
Little Gidding, and some of the events in Italy--these in themselves are
sufficient to make a novel of unusual interest. On the human side, where
the emotions are of a dreamy, half-mystical sort, the work is equally
successful; in its own kind the love of Inglesant and Mary Collet is
beautiful beyond the common love of man and woman. But the novel fails,
it must be acknowledged, in the expression of the more ordinary motives
of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained obedience to the Jesuit is one of
the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is nothing in the story to make
this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the same way Johnnie's
attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the author, and
sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up with
Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the
vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of
exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's
hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his
passion, in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of
bewilderment. Curiously enough, it was one of the incidents in this
hide-and-seek portion of the story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a
well-known guide-book," that actually suggested the novel to him. For my
own part, the sustained charm of the language, a style midway, as it
were, between that of Thackeray and that of Hawthorne, not quite so
negligently graceful as the former nor quite so deliberate as the
latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy compound--the
language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me through these
inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can understand,
nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the purely
human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is the
human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in
form with the passing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better
equipped for the future; his novels are not concerned with phases of
religion, but with the moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt,
which are eternally the same.
And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in
English to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its
vitality and be forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has
gone below the shifting of forms and formulae to the instinct that lies
buried in the heart of each man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have
already referred to those early chapters, the most perfect in the book I
think, wherein is told how Johnnie, a grown boy now, visits his
childhood's masters and questions them about the Divine Light which he
would behold and follow amid the wandering lights of this world. Mr.
Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his mother's knee, that
such a Guide dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we need only to
hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He thought that
it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and philosophers of
Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks--the
godlike and the beautiful in one"--was still the lesson to be practised
to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all
understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to
understand how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and
again in his letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures
to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once
calls it.
But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to
Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to
the gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus.
The precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr.
Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I
advocate belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of
logic, the idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men
know and doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the
sacraments that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest
means of obtaining the silence of the world through which the Inner
Voice speaks and is heard.
To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's
logic--this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in
the world of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the
belief in the actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine
Nature in human life. Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for
one who held at the same time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato;
their union might be called the wedding of pure religion and pure
philosophy, wherein the more bigoted and inhuman character of the former
was surrendered, while to the latter was added the power to touch the
universal heart of man. As Mr. Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant
came to view them, the sacraments might be called a memorial of that
mystic wedding. They brought to it the historic consciousness and the
traditional brotherhood of mankind; they were the symbolism through
which men sought to introduce the light into their own lives as a
religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and to be felt,
whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a
subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England
suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh
of logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas,
we have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot
reason about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of _John
Inglesant_ lies in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to
precedent, and in its frank search for the human and the artistic.
It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could speak of his book as
above all an attempt "to promote culture at the expense of fanaticism,
including the fanaticism of work": but we shall miss the full meaning
of his intention if we omit the corollary of those words, viz.: "to
exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good
of one's neighbour, but one's own culture." I do not know, indeed, but
this exaltation of the old theory that the chief purpose of religion is
the worship and beatitude of the individual soul, in opposition to the
humanitarian notions which were even then springing into prominence, is
the central theme of the story. Certainly with many readers the scene
that remains most deeply impressed in their memory is that which shows
Inglesant coming to Serenus de Cressy at the House of the Benedictines
in Paris, and, like the young man who came to Jesus, asking what he
shall do to make clear the guidance of the Inner Light. There, in those
marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence of the ways before
him: "On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and of intellect,
the beauty of that wonderful creation which God made, yet did not keep;
the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's art;
on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old man, who had himself
turned from the gardens of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees
the hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into this eloquent
appeal:
I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no tampering
with the truth. Come with me to Douay; you shall enter our house
according to the strictest rule; you shall engage in no study
that is any delight or effort to the intellect; but you shall
teach the smallest children in the schools, and visit the poorest
people, and perform the duties of the household--and all for
Christ. I promise you on the faith of a gentleman and a priest--I
promise you, for I have no shade of doubt--that in this path you
shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; you shall walk
with Jesus day by day, growing ever more and more like to Him; and
your path, without the least fall or deviation, shall lead more
and more into the light, until you come unto the perfect day; and
on your death-bed--the death-bed of a saint--the vision of the
smile of God shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you
at the gates of eternal life.
We are told that every word went straight to Inglesant's conviction, and
that no single note jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that
what the Benedictine offered him he should find. But he also knew that
this was not the only way of service--nor even, perhaps, the highest. He
turned away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, and continued his
search for the light in that direction whither the culture of his own
nature led him; he showed--though this neither he nor Mr. Shorthouse,
perhaps, would acknowledge--that at the bottom of his heart Plato and
not Christ was his master, and that to him practical Christianity was
only one of the many historic forms which the so-called Platonic insight
assumes among men. To some, no doubt, this attempt to make of religion
an art will savour of that peculiar form of hedonism, or bastard
Platonism, which Walter Pater introduced into England, and _John
Inglesant_ will be classed with _Marius the Epicurean_ as a blossom of
aesthetic romanticism. There is a certain show of justification in the
comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse quite possibly grants too
much to the enervating acquiescence in the lovely and the decorous; it
lacks a little in virility. But the difference between the two books is
still more radical than the likeness. Though absolute truth may not be
within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of John Inglesant is a
discipline and a growth toward a verity that emanates from acknowledged
powers and calls him out of himself. The senses have no validity in
themselves. He aims to make an art of religion, not a religion of art;
the distinction is deeper than words. The true parentage of the work
goes back, in some ways, to Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting
parallel might be drawn.
In the end Inglesant returns to England, after years spent in France and
Italy among Roman Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms of
his own land. His character had been strengthened by experience, and in
following the higher instincts of his own nature he had attained the
assurance and the sanctity of one who has not quailed before a great
sacrifice. The last scene in the book, the letter which relates the
conversation with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at Worcester, should
be read as a complement to the earlier chapters which describe his
boyish search for what he was not to find save through the lesson of
years; the whole book may be regarded as a link between these two
presentations of the hero's life. It would require too many words to
repeat Inglesant's confession even in outline. "The Church of England,"
says the writer of the letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is
powerless to exert its discipline.... If there be absolute truth
revealed, there must be an inspired exponent of it, else from age to age
it could not get itself revealed to mankind." And Inglesant replies:
"This is the Papist argument, there is only one answer to it--Absolute
truth is not revealed. There were certain dangers which Christianity
could not, as it would seem, escape. As it brought down the sublimest
teaching of Platonism to the humblest understanding, so it was
compelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritual and abstract truth
to hard and inadequate dogma. As it inculcated a sublime indifference to
the things of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the future, so, by
this very means, it encouraged the growth of a wild unreasoning
superstition."
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those words, taken with the
plea which follows, express the finest wisdom struck out of the long and
for the most part futile Battle of the Churches; they were the creed of
Mr. Shorthouse, as they were the experience of the hero of his book. I
would end with that image of life as a sacred game with which Inglesant
himself closed his confession of faith at the Cathedral door:
The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a mysterious
future which we cannot see. We are like children, or men in a
tennis court, and before our conquest is half won the dim twilight
comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places,
and above all things hold fast by the law of life we feel within.
This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by
placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development
which the Divine Wisdom has planned. Let us follow in His steps
and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for
our "mortal passage," tread the free and spacious streets of that
Jerusalem which is above.