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.
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