Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes | Page 9

bent, applied to meet extreme passes of imaginative perfection and delicacy. The picture is na?vely introduced and obscurely, somewhat trenchantly elaborated, allows itself to be apologetically understood; whilst in succession the lower taste for animal sentiment is sorcerized by vivid flashes of captivating contrast, forked, as lightning, and left, as embers smouldering to glow in the crucible of memory's recesses. Specious instances of irony playing the manliest part: flashes of meteoric, mesmeric eloquence, fitfully flecking the embossed page, as one tier or set of ideas, in rhetoric orchestration, symphonizes with or eclipses another. Connection, an element of robust mesmeric cohesion with this prized author being the adamantine hyphen, the articulating link, which compacts the roll. John Henry Shorthouse, the templar, the confessor of music, was, and concurrently, the apologist of philosophic light. Engaged to a powerful mechanism of romantic dogma, the nett article of its creed; the neochromatic acoustic regalia of stage eloquence, the key, or longest recurrent note; the van or middle the next, the sinuous lever of stage discipline. After all, concurrently may it not, be said that this colour instinct aspect of cosmically conceived romanticism is never wilfully vulgarized. For its incomparable, iconographical purpose it exists, and is as intrinsically useful and serviceable to the scheme as the figures which admirably illustrate the pictures of Hogarth and Holman Hunt. When introduced, music is rarely intended to edge itself into the important place of "first study." This in alchemy or personification being occupied by the circumstantial cruxes of life, philosophic morality, vested usually in courtly attire; I would not say abstract attire, for the clean-cut character it bears is too strictly defined (for the sake of that Artist's art) for such an impression to be born, or even to lurk by sentiment, there beneath.
The mould employed at all times is minutely fashioned, as a sculptor would, by investing his model with a code of spirituality, inspired with fire, which epicureanly endows fleeting emotion with a voice, and vitality lends also to distant-reaching invisible ends: hinting that the picturesque alchemy of music is potential too in reaching and touching the lower chords of animal passion, where movement is rapid and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever to animal instincts without measure in extolling the complex phases of court, ecclesiastic, and domestic oligarchy. Statesmanship and subjunction rise and peacefully sink together, and in his magnetic touch, are made to harmoniously coalesce in the political balance. Shorthouse the author, a believer in, a champion was of two-fold or dual cosmos: his colour sense being susceptible to and wrought upon in singular consular consistence with the effulgent dogmas of its creed, and in alliance with the spirit of the cinque cento Italian Renaissance Schools of Painting and Architecture. Practically speaking, he conceived a train of adept ideas, at times fanciful, and at times morbid, transforming them adroitly by adept excursions of cross-lit introspection, accentuation, and by dint of manual caress, as the first of players upon stringed instruments.
Music, I would apologetically infer, being the middle, the rallying feature, of Mr. J.H. Shorthouse's verbose apology. If fictionizing in prose, he writes with brief orange-hued flashes of liquid ether; each of short, all but, brief span. Characteristically, he belongs to the same school and unapproachable law as the French organist-composer, C.M. Widor: stringent, petulant observance of free uncurbed metronome time, allied to picturesque handling; punctuality of tidal consort rigidly regarding, when each, the one to the other, linked; less a care, by virtuous intuition displaying for lyric measure. The writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne more forcibly and piquantly evince cylindrical flow, and strike at the object lesson with less artificial, _cadavre_, fastidious touch; but Mr. Shorthouse, speaking strictly, as to temper and tempo is a trifle more rugged; and never a shadow of suspense suffered he to stir a hand's breadth, that is, rest 'twixt poetic certainty and doubt, lest the ultimate end should all-attainable be or not. For freedom from this, and other literary ambiguity, yet never manifesting anxiety of freeing himself in prose from its insidious and arbitrary restraint, I attribute his tragical, subtle, gentle power of "connection," _liaison_; feeling for time; planetary time, be it lunar time, sometimes unmistakably, solar time; disallowing, by potency of sentimental touch, a sense of rupture, to linger. A noble stream by mute comparison, pursuing its course unwavering; interrupted but now and again, to the vast expansive ocean of shapeliness, of unity.
J. ATWOOD.SLATER,
_Premium Holder & Medallist of the Royal Academy of Arts, London._
Hill Side, Cotham Hill, Bristol.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes, by J. Atwood.Slater
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORIGINAL LETTERS ***
***** This file should be named 13203-8.txt or 13203-8.zip ***** This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/3/2/0/13203/
Produced by