Part 14

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 terrâ_,' 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'Église 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 formulæ.

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 _innocuæ silentia vitæ_, 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.