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.
Pages:
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335