Shelburne Essays Part 10

It is also true, and Sterne's life is witness thereof, that in certain ages, when compa.s.sion and tenderness of heart have taken the place of religion's austerer virtues, a man may preach with conviction on Sunday, and on Monday join without much disquiet of conscience in the revelries of a "Crazy" Castle. There is not a great deal for the moralist to say on such a life; it is a matter for the historian to explain. At Cambridge Sterne had made the acquaintance of John Hall Stevenson, the owner of Skelton, or "Crazy," Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within convenient reach of Sterne's Yorks.h.i.+re homes. An excellent engraving in the present edition gives a fair notion of this fantastic dwelling before its restoration. On a fringe of land between the edge of what seems a stagnant pool and the foot of some barren hills, the old pile of stone sits dull and lowering. First comes a double terrace rising sheer from the water, and above that a rambling, comfortless-looking structure, pierced in the upper story by a few solemn windows. Terraces and building alike are braced with outstanding b.u.t.tresses, as if, like the House of Usher, the ancient edifice might some day split and crumble away into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy square tower erected long ago for defence; at the other stands a slender octagonal turret with its famous weatherc.o.c.k, by whose direction the owner regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears an aspect of bleakness and solitude, in startling contrast with the wild doings of host and guests. A study yet to be made is a history of the clubs or a.s.sociations of the eighteenth century, which, in imitation, no doubt, of the newly inst.i.tuted Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of adding the sting of a fraternal secrecy to the commonplace pleasures of dissipation. Famous among these were the "Monks of Medmenham Abbey," and the "h.e.l.l-Fire Club," and to a less degree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall Stevenson gathered into his notorious abode. If Sterne found his amus.e.m.e.nt in this boisterous a.s.sembly, it is charitable (and the evidence points this way) to suppose that he enjoyed the jovial wit and grotesque pranks of such a company rather than its viciousness. It is at least remarkable that Hall Stevenson, or "Eugenius," as Sterne called him, seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine by more than one piece of practical advice. Above all, there lay at Skelton a great collection of Rabelaisian books, brought together by the owner during his tours on the Continent; and to this Sterne owed his eccentric reading and that acquaintance with the world's humours and whimsicalities which were to make his fortune.

Here, then, in the library of his compromising friend, he gathered the material for his great work, _Tristram Shandy_; and, indeed, if we credit some scholars, he gathered so successfully that little was left for his own creative talents. It is demonstrably true that he made extraordinary use of certain old French books, including Rabelais, whom he counted with Cervantes as his master; and from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ he borrowed unblus.h.i.+ngly, not to mention other English authors. We are shocked at first to learn that some of his choicest pa.s.sages are stolen goods; the recording angel's tear was shed, it appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released long before that gentleman was born to sweeten the world; so too the wind was tempered to the shorn lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added that text to the stock of biblical quotations. But after all, there is little to be gained by unearthing these plagiarisms. _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journey_ still remain among the most original productions in the language, and we are only taught once more that genius has a high-handed way of taking its own where it finds it.

The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely does more than affect a few of those set pieces or purple patches by which an author like Sterne gradually comes to be known and judged. These are admirably adapted for use in anthologies, for they may be severed from their context without cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one suppose that from reading them he gets anything but a distorted view of Sterne's work. They are all marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos--the recording angel's tear, Uncle Toby's fly, the dead a.s.s, the caged starling, Maria of Moulines (I name them as they occur to me)--and they give a very imperfect notion of the true Shandean flavour. In their own genre they are no doubt masterpieces, but it is a genre which gives pleasure from the perception of the art, and not from the kindling touch of nature, in their execution. They are ostensibly pathetic, yet they make no appeal to the heart, and I doubt if a tear was ever shed over any of them--even by the lachrymose Yorick himself. To enjoy them properly one must key his mind to that state in which the emotions cease to have validity in themselves, and are changed into a kind of exquisite convention. Now, it is easier by far to detect the inherent insubstantiality of such a convention than to appreciate its delicately balanced beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much of Sterne's false sentiment from those who base their criticism primarily on these famous episodes. For my part I am almost inclined to place the story of Le Fevre in this cla.s.s, and to wonder if those who call it pathetic really mean that it has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost me a sigh.

No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are not many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their range of action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a memorable distinctness which have never been surpa.s.sed. Not the bustling people of Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr.

Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor characters of the servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful vividness; and if there is a single failure in all that gallery of portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from the author and is foisted upon the company somewhat unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor is the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. One of the constant creeds of the age, handed down from the old comedy of humours, was the belief in the "ruling pa.s.sion" as the source of all a man's acts. The persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters and novels are a succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single motive. They are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling pa.s.sion, both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his _hobbyhorsical_ philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are Tristram's father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted humours--Mr. Shandy, who would regulate all the affairs of life by abstract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart. Between them Sterne would seem to have set over against each other the two divided sources of human activity; and the minor characters, each with his cherished hobby, are ranged under them in proper subordination. The art of the narrative--and in this Sterne is without master or rival--is to bring these characters into a group by some common motive, and then to show how each of them is thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take, for example, the tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. Shandy had "the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr.

Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this is one of the more entertaining scenes of the book, for at every step one or another of the listeners throws in an exclamation which intimates how the words are falling in with his own peculiar train of thought. The result is a delightful cross-section of human nature, as it actually exists. "Our armies swore terribly in _Flanders_, cried my Uncle _Toby_--but nothing to this.--For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so."

But it is not this persistent and very human egotism alone which makes the good people of Shandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originator and master of the gesture and the att.i.tude. Like a skilful player of puppets, he both puts words into the mouths of his creatures and pulls the wires that move them. No one has ever approached him in the art with which he carries out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the brain into the most minute and precise posturing. Before Corporal Trim reads the sermon his exact att.i.tude is described so that, as the author says, "a statuary might have modelled from it." Throughout all the dialogue between the two contrasted brothers we follow every movement of the speakers, as if we sat with them in the flesh, and when Mr. Shandy breaks his pipe the moment is tense with expectation. But the supreme exhibition of this art occurs at the announcement of Bobby's death. Let us leave Mr. Shandy and my Uncle Toby discoursing over this sad event, and turn to the kitchen. Those who know the scene may pa.s.s on:

----My young master in _London_ is dead! said Obadiah.--

----A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which _Obadiah's_ exclamation brought into _Susannah's_ head....

--O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried _Susannah_.--My mother's whole wardrobe followed.--What a procession! her red damask,--her orange tawney,--her white and yellow lutestrings,--her brown taffata,--her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable under-petticoats.--Not a rag was left behind.--"_No,--she will never look up again_," said _Susannah_.

We had a fat, foolish scullion--my father, I think, kept her for her simplicity;--she had been all autumn struggling with a dropsy.--He is dead, said _Obadiah_,--he is certainly dead!--So am not I, said the foolish scullion.

----Here is sad news, _Trim_, cried _Susannah_, wiping her eyes as _Trim_ stepp'd into the kitchen,--master _Bobby_ is dead and _buried_--the funeral was an interpolation of _Susannah's_--we shall have all to go into mourning, said _Susannah_.

I hope not, said _Trim_.--You hope not! cried _Susannah_ earnestly.--The mourning ran not in _Trim's_ head, whatever it did in _Susannah's_.--I hope--said _Trim_, explaining himself, I hope in G.o.d the news is not true--I heard the letter read with my own ears, answered _Obadiah_; and we shall have a terrible piece of work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.--Oh! he's dead, said _Susannah_.--As sure, said the scullion, as I'm alive.

I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said _Trim_, fetching a sigh.--Poor creature!--poor boy!--poor gentleman!

--He was alive last _Whitsontide_! said the coachman.--_Whitsontide!_ alas! cried _Trim_, extending his right arm, and falling instantly into the same att.i.tude in which he read the sermon,--what is _Whitsontide_, _Jonathan_ (for that was the coachman's name), or _Shrovetide_, or any tide or time past, to this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)--and are we not--(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!--'T was infinitely striking!

_Susannah_ burst into a flood of tears.--We are not stocks and stones.--_Jonathan, Obadiah_, the cookmaid, all melted.--The foolish fat scullion herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees, was rous'd with it.--The whole kitchen crowded about the corporal.

There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing quite comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, quizzical sense of the way in which our human personalities are jumbled together in this strange world. And in the end the feeling that lies covered up in the heart of each, the feeling that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presence of death, is conveyed in that supreme gesture of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the book is magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature and significance.

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than an ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their roles. Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of the great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a philosophy, a new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these scenes, which makes of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He was not indulging his author's vanity when he thought of himself as a follower of Rabelais and Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them rather than with his great contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his greater successors, Thackeray and d.i.c.kens. Nor is his exact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem to see the embryonic humour of a world coming to the birth and not yet fully formed. Through the crust of the old mediaeval ideals the new humanism was struggling to emerge, and in its first l.u.s.ty liberty mankind, with the clog of the old civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those monsters that Nature threw off when she was preparing her hand for a higher creation. There is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one perceives the pride of the design that is foreshadowed and will some day come to its own.

Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is about his humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside by the new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily the ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of the past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour of man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the bitterness of a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old ideals had pa.s.sed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw only corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the disguise of liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented his rage in that mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet.

His was the sardonic humour. But time that takes away brings also its compensation. To Sterne, living among smaller men, these pa.s.sionate egotisms are dwindled to mere caprices, and a jest becomes more appropriate than a sneer. And after all, one good thing is left. There is the kindly heart and the humble acknowledgment that we too are seeking our own petty ends. It is a world of homely chance into which Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His humour is merely whimsical; his smile is almost a caress.

I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth a.s.sumes the sly smile, and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying, "We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this world.

It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the blind G.o.ddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunate birth, the crus.h.i.+ng of his nose, the grotesque mistake in naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of _Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it according to the humour of a mad Yorks.h.i.+re parson. And all of us at times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society.

Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire ecole_. It flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.

Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung, and in part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not p.r.o.ne to fall into cant whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family edition of Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the introduction: "After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one needs a thorough bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one needs strychnine and iron and a complete change of blood." It does not seem to me that the case with Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais wrote when the human pa.s.sions were emerging from restraint, and it was part of his humour to paint the l.u.s.ty youth of the world in colours of grotesque exaggeration. Sterne, coming in an age of conventional manners, pointed slyly to the gross and untamed thoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneath all their stiffened decorum. It was the purpose of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of Rabelais's, to turn the under side of human nature up to the light, and to show how Fortune smiles at the social proprieties; but his instrument was necessarily innuendo instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of Pantagruelism.

Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a way as to draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really exists.

We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this perhaps, though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his suggestive style.

One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the _pueris reverentia_ be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on those who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of life) I am inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those like the _Venus and Adonis_, which throw the colours of a glowing imagination over what is in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am inclined to think that Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds than ever Sterne could do, and that even Pantagruelism is more inflammatory than Shandeism. So far as morals alone are concerned there is a touch of what may be called inverted cant in this discrimination between the wholesome and the unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight-forward, manly way, put the matter right once for all: "It cannot be said that the licentious humour of _Tristram Shandy_ is of the kind which applies itself to the pa.s.sions, or is calculated to corrupt society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be harmless as to morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life, is not so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean that his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at times by excess of his method.

The first two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were written in 1759, when Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the first day of the year following. Like many another too original work, it had first to go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the great world, when once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon followed his book to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his fame in London during his annual visits and of his reception in Paris reads like enchantment. "My Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the first flush of triumph, "is euery hour full of your Great People of the first Rank, who striue who shall most honor me;--euen all the Bishops have sent their Complim^{ts.} to me, & I set out on Monday Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine w^{h.} Lord Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday L^{d.} Rockingham takes me to Court."

Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society. Lord Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of c.o.xwold, a comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest"

Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it may well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram.

Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different times, also, he published two volumes of _Sermons by Mr. Yorick_, which, in their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as theological discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are for one thing almost the finest example in English of that style which follows the sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word.

But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France restored his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him material for the travel scenes in _Tristram Shandy_ and for the _Sentimental Journey_. But that "vile asthma" was never long absent, and there is something pitiable in the quips and jests with which he covers his dread of the spectre that was pursuing him. We have seen how the travail of his broken body wails in the _Journal to Eliza_; and his last letter, written from his lodging in London to his truest and least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity and pardon: "Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or next day, for perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live--I want to ask a favour of him, if I find myself worse--that I shall beg of you, if in this wrestling I come off conqueror--my spirits are fled--'tis a bad omen--do not weep my dear Lady--your tears are too precious to shed for me--bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.--Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids.--If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so often condemn'd--which my heart, not my head, betray'd me into. Should my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?"--I cannot but feel that the man who wrote that note was kind and good at heart, and that through all his wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through the incoherence of his untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine sweetness.

He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, 1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, n.o.bles and actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by, when some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying ill in his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their old merry-maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it is unique in its terrible simplicity:

About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called "Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr.

Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr.

Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the att.i.tude of poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

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 rea.s.suring 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 ma.n.u.script 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 _h.o.m.o 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 kins.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.surance 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 b.l.o.o.d.y sweat; by Thy cross and pa.s.sion; 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 a.s.sociations 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 ravis.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.d walking in the garden in the cool of the day--and were still not afraid. But we must not pa.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.sics 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 repet.i.tion. 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 pa.s.sed 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.