John Inglesant
Coleman, A. I. du P.
463 JOHN INGLESANT By A. I. du P. COLEMAN MY FIRST reading of John Inglesant was in the far-off days not long after it made its public appearance (it had been privately printed in 1880, but no...
...But for the novel-reader the story justifies itself abundantly by more than one test: by the breathless interest with which it carries him on through the lakes of philosophy in which the current might so easily lose itself, by the distinctness with which scene after scene stands out in the memory years after the book has been read...
...463 JOHN INGLESANT By A. I. du P. COLEMAN MY FIRST reading of John Inglesant was in the far-off days not long after it made its public appearance (it had been privately printed in 1880, but no publisher would take the risk until May, 1881) and its amazing success, due in great part to an enthusiastic article by Mr...
...Speech after speech of his in Inglesant is nothing but a cleverly-woven cento of passages from More's own books or cited in the Life by his disciple Ward...
...whether or not M. Bergson has anything to do with it, I could name half a dozen of the most moving novels of the last five years which are equally inconclusive...
...and I am quite ready to recommend the same procedure to any children of a larger growth who today, having no special interest in Platonic speculation, are minded to make the acquaintance of the book for the first time...
...I have just been reading a new novel which has been reviewed with enthusiasm on every side...
...There is the tense duel of wits and wills when, singlehanded against fearful odds, he sustains the king's honor before Lord Biron and before the Parliamentary tribunal...
...to Shorthouse we owe the skilful fusion and the magic of the graceful and dreamy style...
...Indeed, this skill has led to the absurd charges of plagiarism so widely heralded...
...I think I will not name it, because what I want to say is that while it has a certain nervous, restless power, my pleasure in it was spoiled by its slipshod and careless style...
...It may have been so to the average novel-reader of forty years ago, who liked to have everything settled for him after the manner of the final stanza of The Eve of St...
...It was not written in haste...
...I do not know whether one should send those who have happened by chance upon John Inglesant and been duly impressed by it to the biography of its author written with loving care by his wife, two years after his death in 1903...
...We are in far too much of a hurry nowadays...
...That chapter, I think, is the one I should choose (though the choice would not be an easy one) if I could have but one to illustrate the serene beauty of style which is another unfading element of charm in the book...
...There is the exquisite conclusion of the seventh chapter, where, with the call of his service sounding in his ears, John Inglesant renounces the love of Mary Collet at Little Gidding— and here again the setting is absolutely true to life...
...I have ventured," he says in his preface with quiet irony, "to depict the Cavalier as not invariably a drunken brute, and spiritual life as not exclusively the possession of Puritans and ascetics...
...More than ten years went to the gradual development of the first germ-idea which entered Shorthouse's mind...
...Audacious as it may well seem to touch Lord Acton's shield with one's lance, even now that he is dead, I cannot deny having felt, each time that I have looked at the twenty or thirty pages of his Letters to Mary Gladstone in which he impugns the historical accuracy of the book, a conviction that a little research would enable one to put up a fairly stiff defense...
...There is the thrilling scene in which the ghost of Strafford, two nights after his execution, appears to the king who has let him die—so strong in sheer narrative power that Professor Genung singled it out for inclusion in his bare score of examples of all forms of prose composition to set up as a model...
...My recollection of Joseph Henry Shorthouse is that one would have taken him for a prosperous tailor rather than for a man who could set the most delicate fancies to moving and lovely words...
...But Inglesant gives you on almost any page an arrangement of words which is beautiful for its own sake, even if you let yourself drift along on the lulling flow of the music, heedless of the thought...
...A. C. Benson's impressions seem to have been much the same, received at an age when he too "had as an undergraduate read and reveled in John Inglesant, and was intensely curious to see him and worship him...
...Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century...
...Being then at the unphilosophical age of eighteen, I skipped—I confess it without a blush— nearly all the philosophy, and read for the story alone...
...Poets do not always look the part: there is the delicious tale of the lady who, seeing Robert Browning in a roomful of people, inquired languidly, "Who is that too exuberant financier...
...In any case, no one who has come at all close to the thought of the book can fail to see that no other ending would have been either logical or artistic...
...And perhaps most cherished of all in my own memory is the perfect scene in which Johnny meets his brother's murderer in the lonely mountainpass at dawn and gives his vengeance over to a higher Judge...
...That the masterpiece of a Quaker Platonist, brought up to listen for the Divine Voice in reverent silence, is not, after all, vague or meaningless may be seen from the fact that one of the most earnest and active converts to the Catholic religion in recent years, Robert Hugh Benson, was wont to name John Inglesant among the determining causes which led him to go out from all that he had known and loved, and seek until he found...
...There is the fearsome phantasmagoria which passes in the first chapter before Richard Inglesant's eyes as he lies in the guest-chamber of Westacre (which in reality is the Benedictine priory of Little Malvern, under the shadow of those hills on which Langland dreamed—you may still see its chapel, now an Anglican parish church...
...but it may also be because the descendants of the Puritans have had, on the whole, more of a hearing in the ages that followed...
...we must catch the fleeting impression of a moment as it passes—and the result is that the record of the impression is 464 scarcely more permanent...
...A far lighter but equally illuminating instance of the same method is the truth to history of Lady Isabella Thynne, who flits in her charming disarray across the scene when the king and court are at Oxford—"the possessor of all the virtues save one," drily remarks her contemporary Aubrey...
...There are not many delicate artists in prose among us today...
...If Shorthouse seems to be a little more sympathetic to the Cavaliers than to the Roundheads, it may be partly because he puts himself so thoroughly into the mind of his gentle hero...
...The whole thing is the story of how a man "followed the gleam": and what could be better or more in harmony with the mystical words of Saint John which stand in their original Greek on the title-page—"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be"—than that our last glimpse of Inglesant should show him, since he is still in this world, still following, still seeking...
...I saw him once, in the chapel of my college at Oxford, and was distinctly disappointed by his aspect...
...Take, for instance, the seventeenth chapter, in which the chief figure is Henry More, the most human and fascinating of the Cambridge Platonists (unless perhaps Glanviil, who was an Oxford man...
...It will bear reading again and again, at least for the finished art of its great passages...
...The fact is, the better we know our Inglesant the more we shall realize how much of the groundwork of it is straight from first-hand sources...
...But we have come to understand better that things do not end...
...If it were not for a lingering doubt as to its proportion of philosophy disqualifying it as pure fiction, I should be inclined to place it among the first dozen of historical novels in English...
...Unfading—yes, that is why a man can pick it up after forty years and find a fresh and surprising delight in it...
...I know, at least, of none which gives such a vivid and such a just picture of the mighty struggle between king and Parliament in the seventeenth century which must always be, for Americans as well as for Englishmen, one of the most interesting chapters in history...
...Agnes...
...The man seems to have been so much less interesting than his book...
...I have heard it said that the end of the book is disappointing, because it is inconclusive...
...I once had occasion to make a study of More's writings, and accumulated some delectable folio first editions, of which I read enough to be able to say that scarcely a word is put into More's mouth in the book which did not first come out of it...
...Lady Cardiff, too, is an accurate portrait, except in name, of the redoubtable Lady Conway, and her seat, "Oulton in Dorsetshire," is Ragley in Warwickshire...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 17
