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master, while Puccini had assimilated the tinsel and the stagy pasteboard.

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In 'Pelléas et Mélisande' we have a departure from 3 the Wagner tradition. Its great success marked a definite ge reaction against Wagnerism, but also a step forward in the development of music drama. To the dynamic drama ththere succeeds the static: instead of exaggeration, restraint. More than any of the resounding theories of Opera and Drama,' the Debussy generation remember en the calm words of Maeterlinck, Must we, indeed, roar like the Atrides before the Eternal God will reveal himself in our life? And is he never by our side at times when the air is calm and the lamp burns on, unflickering?' Debussy's realism is very different to the sensational realism of 'Electra.' This method is impressionistic and his great power lies in suggestion, in holding his public in suspense. The composer has succeeded in creating atmosphere and intensifying the emotional appeal of the play. Instead of working as Wagner had done towards the gradual exclusion of all but music, Debussy often creates his climax by silencing his orchestra and allowing the spoken word to exercise its spell over the audience. When we analyse carefully 'Pelléas et Mélisande,' we find that it is in reality a symphonic poem composed by Debussy round the emotional drama of Maeterlinck, but he has succeeded in some of the very theories that Wagner enunciated but did not follow-he has preserved a balance between poetry, music, and painting. Since the production of Debussy's work, music drama has no further conquests to relate; an age of miniaturists in music has arisen, and composers fear the air of the mountain-tops. The world of music awaits the coming of another Siegfried, before whose victorious advance the flames will dissolve into mist.

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WALTER STARKIE.

Art. 9.-SOME TRUTHS ABOUT JOHN INGLESANT.'

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'JOSEPH HENRY SHORTHOUSE added a possible classic to our literature by his "John Inglesant." Thus Sir Edmund Gosse in his pleasant 'Short History of English Literature,' of which a new edition has recently appeared. It is to emphasise both the praise and the caution of this verdict that the present article is written. And first the praise. For 'John Inglesant' survives, alone of all its author's books, and still exercises an undeniable fascination. Indeed, it has a veritable coterie of admirers, though mostly now of an elder generation, who find it worth reading and re-reading. Quite often, too, one sees it quoted, for there are many sentences of unforgettable music that linger in the mind, as well as scenes that impress themselves, in some odd manner, as almost historical. Those whose memories carry them so far back as the 'eighties recall the extraordinary furore excited by the Romance on its first appearance. Its actual writing had been the work of about ten years, but the idea of it had come to Mr Shorthouse far earlier. Yet there had been obstacles to its production, as so often happens to work destined to a long and happy after-life, and for four years the manuscript suffered eclipse in a drawer at Lansdowne, Edgbaston, till a private and limited edition, now of a considerable value, was brought out. A copy was shown to Mr Alexander Macmillan, who yielded at once to the charm of the book, and offered to publish it at his own expense. Thenceforth, its career reads like a fairy-tale. Mr Gladstone happened to be photographed with the volume in his hands, and, with the opinion of Hawarden, Oxford, and London to guide it, the literary world was taken by storm. The quiet Edgbaston manufacturer of vitriol found himself welcomed at the Warden's Lodge of Keble College, lionised at Downing Street itself. ' John Inglesant' became the universal theme of discussion, so much so that it is said that dinner-invitations were at last obliged to indicate that the subject must be barred' as matter for conversation. Mr Shorthouse was deluged

The quotations from 'John Inglesant' are taken from the one vol. Edition, 1883.

with correspondence, and became a sort of minor prophet LES in things of mystical taste.

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The only really discordant note in the pæan of praise ed was the great voice of Lord Acton, who, after taking Tthe book in his daily stride-he was accustomed to read of an octavo volume a day, and the habit was not invariably app wise-wrote several pages of adverse comment to his correspondent, Mrs Drew. It was not one of Acton's most successful pieces of criticism. Shorthouse, punctilious in his English dates, had, in his eagerness to afford his hero as many spiritual experiences as possible, played ducks and drakes with Italian history, sweeping together the events of six Papacies into two. Of this et lapse Acton took full advantage, but Shorthouse must, nevertheless, have breathed again. For his critic accidentally revealed by what he wrote that the authorities on Little Gidding were little known to him, and that somehow the pages of Burton, Hobbes, Evelyn, More, and even Ranke, to say nothing of a group of lesser 17th-century diaries and records, had left, at any rate, no very clear verbal impression on the great historian's mind. For almost impatiently he queries, amid many valid objections, whether the Ferrars ever read Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,' whether Rosicrucianism was talked about in England only twenty years after the Fama had appeared, whether the steps of the Trinità were built in Inglesant's day; in fact, he notes that Shorthouse has never been in Rome, which accounts for many topographical inaccuracies.' Most people since have marvelled at the strange accuracy of the Italian atmosphere. To explain this, Shorthouse was wont to murmur something gently about his father's travels and reminiscences; we can but conjecture whether he called Acton's attention to his Gidding authorities, which would have enlightened him as to the Ferrars' constant study of Foxe, to Burton's Rosicrucian allusions-and 'The Anatomy' appeared in 1617-to Ranke's very definite statement, backed by a reference to Gualterius, as to 1590 for the date of the Trinità steps. Perhaps he did no more than smile his somewhat baffling smile at Acton's oracular verdict that Hobbes is much better

* Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone,' pp. 134-148,

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drawn than More,' since he had found out that books of world-wide fame are not always familiar household memories to men of letters, and that a certain strange habit of his, which had grown upon him through the years of writing his well-loved book, was to pass uncriticised by the experts. And a load must have been lifted from his mind.

For the book is really so very good. In what we are going to say we are not prepared to deny its power and its attractiveness for one moment. A vast amount is the exquisitely moulded individual work of years of patient toil and finished artistry. Only this does not exhaust the whole secret of the power and attraction of 'John Inglesant.' We enlarge the question that so many asked and still ask: How did its author come to know Florence, Siena, Rome, so well? We add: How did he reproduce the atmosphere of the 17th century so vividly? And the answer is a little peculiar, to lovers of 'John Inglesant' it may be even unwelcome. It is this in many parts the book is a miracle of ingenious dove-tailing into its text of a quantity of unacknowledged verbatim quotations from 17th-century writers. Why Shorthouse should have drenched himself in literature contemporary to his tale, and not have rested content to paraphrase all the portions that he required must remain a mystery. Probably he looked for some years on his book as a private labour of love which would never see light; and the trick of taking here a sentence, there a paragraph, there a page or two from an old writer, and cleverly fitting it in with his own beautiful 19th-century English, engaged more and more of his skill and pains until at length, when the hour of publication arrived through the enthusiasm of a few friends, less versed than himself in his originals, he found it impossible to tear out his borrowings from his work without fatally disfiguring the effect of the whole.

To begin at the beginning. Several years ago the present writer, who owns himself a devotee of Shorthouse's book, was reading the Diary of Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker friend of Milton. Ellwood describes his courtship of Mary Ellis thus: Crying to (the Lord) for Direction, before I addressed myself to her, at length, as I was sitting all alone, . . . I felt a Word sweetly arise.

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the in me, as if I had heard a Voice which said, Go and Prevail. And Faith springing in my Heart with the nd Word, I immediately rose and went, nothing doubting.' The sentences seemed oddly familiar; and the reader bo has only to turn to Mr Thorne's account of his courtship Jos of Mary Collet ('J. I.,' p. 82) to find that Mr Thorne and Thomas Ellwood, by a curious coincidence, paid their at addresses word for word alike.

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This chance discovery led, from time to time, to fresh search, and the search reaped a rich reward.

For, ♫ although it has been quite impossible, and, of course, do not very important, to trace all Mr Shorthouse's copyings, enough came to light to make 'John Inglesant' a literary curiosity. It is singular that, among the thousands of its readers, no one seemingly has hitherto noticed these verbatim 'liftings,' extending sometimes to paragraphs and pages. It is true that Shorthouse usually avoided the more obvious sources, such as Clarendon, 'The Compleat Angler,' the 'Religio Medici,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and even Fox's Journal. We may, however, conveniently name here the sources from which he did draw, laying stress on the fact that what is indicated is word for word copying, varying, it is true, very much in extent, and interrupted in places by little alterations of names or facts or the substitution of a modern for an antique word, but copyings nevertheless. It is a sufficiently imposing list-for the account of Little Gidding, we have the Life of Nicholas Ferrar by his brother, John, and the 'Lives' by Peckard and by Jebb; then there are Turbervile's Booke of Hunting'; John Aubrey's Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries'; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy'; Antony à Wood's 'Athenæ Oxonienses,' and his 'Life'; Thomas Wright's 'Letters relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries,' in the Camden Series; England's Black Tribunal'; Ward's 18th-century 'Life of Henry More'; Hobbes'' Leviathan'; Ranke's History of the Popes,' and the Diaries of Evelyn, of Lady Fanshawe, of Reresby, and of Ellwood. There are, besides, some lesser sources.

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The late Monsignor Hugh Benson, a warm admirer of 'John Inglesant,' caused the very beautiful inscription on the latter's imaginary tomb to be placed on his own; and we have heard of another instance of the same kind.

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