After Shorthouse had once tasted the delights of publication and the
pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon
a single string. Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very
successfully; because one of the interesting points about, _John
Inglesant_ is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from
beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy
and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who
masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of
a _macabre_ type.
Of course one would not assign to Shorthouse a very high place in
English literature, beautiful as his best work is. But a writer may
have an interest which is out of proportion to the value of his
writings. The interest of Shorthouse is the interest which attaches to
the blooming of a curious and exotic flower in a place where its
presence is absolutely unaccountable; he probably will not maintain his
hold upon the minds of a later generation, because there is no coherent
system of thought in his book. Inglesant is a mere courtly mirror, the
prey of his moods and his surroundings, in which beautiful tones of
religious feeling are engagingly reflected. But to all who study the
development of English prose, Shorthouse will have a definite value, as
a spontaneous and lonely outcrop of poetical prose-writing in an alien
soil; an isolated worker foreshowing in his secluded and graceful
talent the rise of a new school in English literature, the appearance
of a plant which may be expected in the future, if not in the immediate
future, to break into leaf and bloom, into colour and fragrance.
Pages:
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338