Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

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 cœli 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....