The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

least. They would be prepared to browbeat and contemn originality just as vigorously as their predecessors. They would speak of a modern Keats as a self-indulgent dilettante; of a modern Shelley as an immoral Republican. The fact that the two have stepped silently into Parnassus, receiving nothing but contempt and neglect from those whose duty it was to encourage them, does not seem to enlighten the minds of those who are ready enough to applaud as soon as they find the world applauding. Of course teachers are in a difficult position. There are always at school and college a certain number of wild, fantastic, crude young men, who indulge in unconventional speculations, who have not the genius of Keats and Shelley in the background, but who share their distaste and disgust for the conventionality, the tameness, the vulgarity of the world. It is the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens, Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which the man of genius plays are so tremendous. It is the applause of a nation, the approbation of connoisseurs, the heart-felt gratitude of idealists if you win; and if you fail, a contemptuous pity for gifts wasted and misapplied. But one of the reasons why we are so unintellectual, so conventional, so commonplace a nation is because we do not care for ideas, we do not admire originality, we do not want to be made to think and feel; what we admire is success and respectability; and if a poet can so far force himself upon the attention of timid idealists, who worship beauty in secret, as to sell large editions of his works and make a good income, then we reward him in our clumsy way with glory and worship. It is horrible to reflect that if Shelley had succeeded to his father's baronetcy he would probably have had at once an increased circulation. If Keats had been a peer like Byron, he would have been loaded with vapid commendation. We still cling pathetically in our seats of education to the study of Greek, but whenever the Greek spirit appears, that insatiable appetite for impressions of beauty, that intense desire for mental activity, we think it rather shocking and disreputable. We are at heart commercial Puritans all the time; we loathe experiments and originality and independence; we think that God rewards respectability, because we believe that material rewards--wealth, comfort, position--are the only things worth having. We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty. But let us at least make up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a disgusting compromise. Our way is to persecute genius living and to crown it dead. Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to shout with the largest?


LI


I have been reading the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that is there revealed. He was a well-to-do manufacturer--of vitriol, too, of all the incongruous things. He belonged to a cultivated suburban circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish. He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea. In the evening he wrote and read aloud. The only thing that made him different from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the first occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather coppery in hue. There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the face by large, thin, fly-away whiskers of the kind that used to be known as "weepers" or "Dundrearies." He had then just dawned upon the world as a celebrity. I had myself as an under-graduate read and re-read and revelled in John Inglesant, and I was intensely curious to see him and worship him. But he was not a very worshipful man. He gave the impression of great courtesy and simplicity; but his stammer was an obstacle to any sense of ease in his presence. I seem to recollect that instead of being brought up, as most stammerers are, by a consonant, it took the form with Shorthouse of repeating the word "Too--too" over and over again until the barrier was surmounted; and in order to help himself out, he pulled at his whiskers alternately, with a motion as though he were milking a cow. Some years after I saw him again; he was then paler and more worn of aspect. He had discarded his whiskers, and had grown a pointed beard. He was a distinguished-looking man now, whereas formerly he had only been an impressive-looking one. I do not remember that his stammer was nearly so apparent, and he had far more assurance and dignity, which had come, I suppose, from his having been welcomed and sought after by all kinds of eminent people, and from having found that eminent people were very much like any other people, except that they were more simple and more interesting. I was still conscious of his great kindness and courtesy, a courtesy distributed with perfect impartiality.

But the mystery about him is this. The Life reveals, or seems to reveal, a very commonplace man, cultivated, religious, "decent not to fail in offices of tenderness" like Telemachus, but for all that essentially parochial. His letters are heavy, uninteresting, banal, and reveal little except a very shaky taste in literature. The Essays which are reproduced, which he wrote for Birmingham literary societies, are of the same quality, serious, ordinary, prosaic, mildly ethical.

Yet behind all this, this pious, conscientious man of business contrived to develop a style of quite extraordinary fineness, lucid, beauty-haunted, delicate and profound. John Inglesant is not a wholly artistic hook, because it is ill-proportioned and the structure is weak--the middle is not in the centre, and it leaves off, not because the writer appears to have come to the end, but because it could not well be longer. There is no balance of episodes. It has just the sort of faults that a book might be expected to have which was written at long intervals and not on any very carefully conceived plan. It looks as if Shorthouse had just taken a pen and a piece of paper and had begun to write. Yet the phrasing, the cadence, the melody of the book are exquisite. I do not think he ever reached the same level again, though his other books are full of beautiful passages, except perhaps in the little introduction to an edition of George Herbert, which is a wonderfully attractive piece of writing.

Shorthouse had an extraordinary gift for evoking a certain sort of ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who is discharging a task of almost overwhelming sweetness, to which he consecrates the early purity of the awakening day.

Such was Shorthouse's best and most romantic hour. He had a deep-seated love of ritual; in spite of his inherited quietism--but for all that he was a very liberal Churchman, of the school of Kingsley rather than of the school of Pusey. Ritual was to him a beautiful adjunct; not a symbolical preoccupation.

The mystery is why this very delicate and unique flower of art should have sprung up on this particular soil. The most that one hopes for, in the way of literary interest, from such surroundings, is a muddled optimism, rather timidly expressed, based on the writings of Robert Browning and Carlyle. Instead of this, one gets this precieux antique style, based upon the Bible and John Bunyan, and enriched by a transparent power of tinging modern English with an ancient and secluded flavour.

It shows how very little surroundings and influences have to do with the growth of an artistic instinct, because in the case of Shorthouse it seems to have been a purely spontaneous product. He followed no one; he had the advantage of no trained criticism; because it seems that his only critic was his wife, and though Mrs. Shorthouse appears in these pages as a very courageous, loyal, and devoted woman, it is clear from the record that she had no special literary gift.

The rarity of the thing is part of its wonder. It is possible to tell upon the fingers of one hand, or at all events on the fingers of two hands, the names of all the nineteenth-century writers who have handled prose with any marked delicacy. There are several effective prose-writers, but very few artists. Prose has been employed in England till of late merely as a straightforward method of enforcing and expressing ideas, in a purely scientific manner. Literary craftsmen have turned rather to verse, and here the wonder grows, because one or two specimens of Shorthouse's verse are given, which reveal an absolute incapacity for the process, without apparently the smallest instinct for rhyme, metre, or melody,--the very lowest sort of slipshod amateur poetry.

After Shorthouse had once tasted the delights of publication and the pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon a single string. Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of a macabre type.

Of course one would not assign to Shorthouse a very high place in English literature, beautiful as his best work is. But a writer may have an interest which is out of proportion to the value of his writings. The interest of Shorthouse is the interest which attaches to the blooming of a curious and exotic flower in a place where its presence is absolutely unaccountable; he probably will not maintain his hold upon the minds of a later generation, because there is no coherent system of thought in his book. Inglesant is a mere courtly mirror, the prey of his moods and his surroundings, in which beautiful tones of religious feeling are engagingly reflected. But to all who study the development of English prose, Shorthouse will have a definite value, as a spontaneous and lonely outcrop of poetical prose-writing in an alien soil; an isolated worker foreshowing in his secluded and graceful talent the rise of a new school in English literature, the appearance of a