JOHN INGLESANT – A Victorian Philosophical Romance

These words are certainly unexpected in the preface to a novel, and they are probably less illuminating than the author intended, but they seize the reader’s attention. As if anticipating the puzzlement at the coupling of the words Philosophy and Romance, the author then goes on to paint an ambitious picture of what we might expect from such a Romance:

It is only human life in the highways and hedges, and in the streets and lanes of the city, with the ceaseless throbbing of its quivering heart; it is only kindliness and neighbourhood and child-life, and the fresh wind of heaven, and the waste of sea and forest, and the sunbreak upon the stainless peaks, and contempt of wrong and pain and death, and the passionate yearning for the face of God, and woman’s tears, and woman’s self-sacrifice and devotion, and woman’s love. Yes it is only a Romance. It is only the ivory gates falling back at the fairy touch. It is only the leaden sky breaking for a moment above the bowed and weary head, revealing the fathomless Infinite through the gloom.

In the light of these words, few readers who had paid attention to the preface would not wish to go on and explore the novel itself, explore being the operative word, for it runs to some 750 pages, and is unlike any other book of its time. Its title is simply John Inglesant, its author was John Henry Shorthouse, and it was published in 1880. It is a historical novel, set in the years between 1630 and 1680, its first half telling the story of the religious and civil conflict in England at that time, after which the scene shifts to continental Europe, mainly to Italy, where we are given an absorbing evocation of the dramas and complexities of religious politics and social life.

              Shorthouse had an unexpected background for a religious and philosophical novelist. He inherited a chemical works in Birmingham, and continued as a chemical manufacturer throughout his early life. He was born a Quaker, but in his middle twenties he converted to the Church of England; he favoured the High Church form of Anglicanism which had arisen with the Oxford Movement, and he mistrusted the authoritarian claims of the Roman Catholic Church. He reportedly worked for ten years on this, his first novel, John Inglesant, and none of his subsequent novels equalled it in its scope or the deep impression that it made. He gave the novel a framing narrative in which a young Oxford scholar of his own day discovers a large collection of private papers relating the life of John Inglesant, most of them presumably written by Inglesant himself, and determines to edit and publish them. This device is not particularly helpful, because the novel is written entirely in the third person, as if by an omniscient narrator, and the creation of a living voice telling his life story is only partially successful. However there are many passages in which Inglesant’s words are quoted directly to us, sometimes at length, like speeches in a play. The Oxford scholar is never named, and his own story plays no part in the action.

               The novel opens by painting the family background of the central figure, commencing in the 1530s, the time of the suppression of the monasteries, when Inglesant’s forebears acquired the former monastic estate of Westacre in Wiltshire. We then move forward to approximately the early 1620s, and find John and his identical twin brother, Eustace, at first growing up together, but soon separated, when Eustace, the first-born, is sent to London to be trained for his future position as lord of the manor and a courtier, while John remains at home. The Inglesant family have remained loyal to the old Catholic faith, but have compromised whenever their duty to the Protestant crown has demanded it. John is educated privately by a strange clergyman, an excellent teacher and a learned scholar, who instructs John in the classics, and in religion and philosophy of a very unusual kind, which include Neo-platonic mysticism, astrology and alchemy. John is an intelligent and perceptive student and is drawn very deeply in to the spiritual life. His father soon introduces him to a mysterious figure named Hall, a Jesuit missionary priest whose strategic aim is to promote Catholic power and somehow to steer the Anglican church and the Catholic into harmony. Hall is Father Santa Clara, who will be a powerful and charismatic influence on John’s life. John himself is not recruited into the Jesuit order or even the Catholic Church, but he is to be an agent who can move between the varied Christian factions, carrying messages and conducting negotiations; he is serious, educated, knowledgeable and handsome. He will first be sent to London to become a page to Queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I, and to learn the ways of the court. In London he is reunited with his brother and physical double, Eustace; however he has become a hedonist, sharply contrasted with John’s genuine spiritual devotion.

His spirituality is deepened still further when he learns of, and visits, the quasi-monastic Anglican community led by Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, where he meets, among others, the poets Richard Crashaw and George Herbert, and begins to fall in love with the beautiful and devout Mary Collet. Back in London John is introduced to Thomas Hobbes, the pragmatic philosopher, and seeks his guidance on the problems of the inner religious life when matched against reason and against the quarrels among the Christian churches. Hobbes argues that the Catholic Church is first and foremost a power structure, most of whose believers have no philosophy and are overawed and afraid to challenge its doctrines. Hobbes questions John concerning the divine and the inner life: is it genuine or merely implanted in us by clergymen? How can we believe or know anything unless we have first been taught it? These questions deter John from giving his allegiance to the Catholics or the Anglicans, while his experience at Little Gidding lingers strongly in his mind; towards the Puritans his feelings are hostile, regarding them as crude fanatics. This section of the book is among the most memorable, and the author must have researched carefully into these historical figures, and especially Ferrar and his community, memorialised by T.S.Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding”.

              By 1640 it seems clear that religious and political division were driving England towards civil war. John Inglesant becomes a servant of King Charles, chiefly as a messenger. He visits Little Gidding again. Mary Collet clearly returns John’s love but she is torn between her personal feelings and her religious vocation. The King himself visits Little Gidding, and then goes with John to Oxford, which is to become the headquarters of the Royalist party, and the author paints a colourful picture of Oxford thronged with cavaliers and their ladies. John takes part in the indecisive Battle of Edgehill where he is slightly wounded, and he returns to Oxford. We are given portraits of the King’s most active lieutenant, The Earl of Strafford, and his right-hand churchman, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, both of whom are destined to be executed by the Parliamentary party. Escaping the besieged city of Oxford, the King moves to the West Country while John is sent to London to try, unsuccessfully, to help Laud. For John the major event of these years of conflict is the dangerous secret commission which the Jesuit, Santa Clara, entrusts to him: it is to carry to Ireland the details of a plan to raise an army of Irish Catholics to be brought to England to save the King’s cause. If this became known it would destroy the King’s authority in England, and Santa Clara warns John that the King will not stand by him if the plan is exposed. John accepts these terms, knowing that it could end in his capture and death. The plot does indeed unravel; it is widely ascribed to the Jesuits, and John is arrested and sent to London to be tried for treason to Parliament and the state. In connection with the trial, the figure of Milton is introduced as an advisor to Generals Cromwell and Ireton. John is tried and sentenced to be executed, but at the last moment he is reprieved, why we are not told immediately, but it emerges that Santa Clara has secretly managed it, aided by John’s brother Eustace. Meanwhile the King has been taken prisoner by the Parliamentarians, after seeking shelter at Little Gidding, coming as T.S.Eliot put it, “…at night like a broken King.”   The King is never set free, and with his trial and execution the Parliamentary cause is triumphant.

              John escapes to Eustace’s country house in Wiltshire, where Eustace’s wife is ill and half mad. She has gathered around her a strange group of philosophers and quasi-magicians, some of them known to history, such as the great chemist, Van Helmont, and the Cambridge Neoplatonist, Henry More. Eustace relates to John some of his travels in Europe, especially in Italy, and tells him in particular of an enemy he had made in Venice, a violent and treacherous man who confided many secrets to Eustace; astrologers had warned Eustace to beware of this dangerous man. This warning is tragically fulfilled when Eustace’s body is found, stabbed to the heart by an Italian stilleto. This event casts a deep shadow over John’s life. He determines to leave England for France where he hopes to assist to exiled Royalists, but also to solve the mystery of his brother’s death. This is a major turning point in the novel, which now acquires a totally new setting and a new cast of characters. In spite of this tragedy, it appears that his future life will be an independent one, since his brother’s widow settles a large sum of money on him which give him a high degree of freedom.

              He settles first in Paris among the English refugees where he meets the Queen, and more importantly to him personally, he encounters Mary Collet again, who is weak and ill and evidently dying. She tells him that the Little Gidding community has been suppressed by the Puritans, who suspected it of Catholic sympathies. She implores him to abandon the world of political intrigue in which he had become entangled, and return to God. John is shaken to the depths of his being, and as Mary dies he experiences some form beatific vision. Not long after Mary’s death he meets an old Oxford acquaintance who has become a Benedictine monk, who gives him the same advice that Mary Collet had; that he should turn solely to the religious life. John is moved by this, but still feels the call to action, that his worldly life still holds him. His future is decided when he meets Santa Clara once more, and they discuss the ruin of all their plans for England’s religious future; he accepts the reality that until the Puritans lose their hold on power, which he believes will not be long, nothing can be done. He therefore advises John to go on to Rome and make contact with highly-placed churchmen to whom Santa Clara will give him introductions. John accepts this advice, partly because the plan to identify his brother’s murderer is still in the back of mind.

              Travelling down through Italy, Inglesant experiences the serene beauty of the countryside, and asks himself once again why his existence should be one of pain and striving, and whether he was following the path of truth or not. In Rome he seeks out the Jesuit College where he is welcomed, and secures the patronage of Cardinal Rinuccini. He finds several people who know something of the assassin, a notoriously evil man known as Malvolti, and several times John crosses his path but without being able to confront him. On a visit to Florence, John falls in with a wild carnival crowd, masked as angels and demons, and he is sure that Malvolti is present, and that he has killed yet another victim. The author creates an atmosphere akin to that of an Elizabethan revenge drama, bringing out the passionate, implacable feud-mentality and violence found in Italian society. In this setting he befriends a very dubious aristocratic family, especially the son, the Cavaliere Guardino, and his beautiful sister, Lauretta, with whom he falls in love, but whom he senses to be dangerous.

              We are given fine and extensive descriptions of Rome at a time when St Peter’s was recently completed, written with religious fervour, and John experiences the power of baroque magnificence to make the visitor believe that the church may indeed be the house of God. Yet the squalor of daily life in much of Italy, even in Rome itself, is not lost on him, for it grants him an insight into the essence of Christianity, which he sees as an understanding of sin and suffering; we suffer for our own sins and the sins of others: this is human life, for in this suffering we find a healing and purifying power. This is not an abstract intellectual idea, but an iron law. “This, the intellectual Christ, the Platonic Socrates, did not offer; hence his failure and the success of the Nazarene: Vicisti Galilaee.”

              The outstanding episode of John’s time in Rome is his close acquaintance with Miguel de Molinos, a Spanish priest who caused a brief but profound stir throughout the city. He was a spiritual director, one who advised and cared for the spiritual life of his followers as a doctor cares for the physical life of his patients. Molinos was a charismatic guide whose teaching was essentially a via negativa, close to mysticism, Jansenism and the religion of Pascal. God was beyond our knowledge and our thought: he who approached God through reason or through the doctrines of theology is not approaching the true God. Silence and devotion of the mind towards God are all that matters. Even sin may not be sin if it is part of nature, not of the will. The practice of confession before communion, hitherto a sacrosanct law of the church, was unnecessary as were acts of penance, which may embed the presence of sin in the mind; purity comes from intention alone, and the whole of life should be filled with God. This was subtle psychology, and the Molinos approach came to be called Quietism; for a time it attracted some thousands of people, predominantly women. To the Catholic churchmen, however, Quietism appeared to be a great danger, a threat to their authority, while malicious rumours of its leader’s impropriety with women began to spread. Inglesant was deeply impressed by Molinos, and saw his teaching as possibly opening a new era in the history of the Church, but the Church leaders acted swiftly. Arrested by the Inquisition, Molinos was tried and condemned to imprisonment for life; a hundred years earlier he would almost certainly have been burned. Inglesant himself is arrested along with many others, and held for some weeks before he is released. The account of Molinos in John Inglesant counterbalances that of the Little Gidding community, the one being a singular event in Catholic church history, the other in Anglican. John himself strongly sympathised with both of these experiments in personal religion, and they clearly reflected the author’s enthusiasm for the cultivation of private devotion and spiritual life, and his mistrust of authoritarian church systems, Catholic or Puritan.              

              This section of the book is followed by a very different episode in which John visits a city evidently based on Urbino, where the Duke is still living like a Renaissance prince, surrounded by art treasures, and toying with a cult resembling the pagan worship of nature, a philosophy of aestheticism and pleasure. John is intrigued by this, and his conversations with the Duke recall the Marius the Epicurean, the novel by Walter Pater set in ancient Rome; if there is a influence here however, it must have been from Shorthouse to Pater, since Marius post-dates  Iglesant by eight years. John concludes that the Romans and the Italians generally have a dual nature, part Christian and part still pagan, part spiritual and part ruthlessly sensual. John is shaken to discover that Lauretta’s brother has actually been closely associated with the assassin Malvolti. Lauretta begs John to save her from her family, and together they escape from the city to a country estate in the Apennines, bequeathed to John by the Duke. John and Lauretta can now marry and begin an idyllic life together, which does not however endure for long, for the plague makes its appearance and spreads through much of southern Italy. Lauretta is anxious for her brother, and, rather implausibly, begs John to go in search of him. In Rome John is told that that the brother has gone to Naples, where John follows him. There follows a horrifying description of Naples in the ravages of the great plague of 1656. John himself escapes the infection and he does find the Cavaliere, who is dying, and still more strangely he finds Malvolti, but horribly changed, blind and in the utmost state of wretchedness. He dies soon after, but not before he had told John that he has sought redemption from his former evil life by ministering to the plagues victims, and John is finally able to forgive him. This entire section is graphic and melodramatic, laden with religious passion, misery, sin, and the rhetoric of redemption, culminating in not one but two visions of Christ; the first in the streets of Rome and the other in a plague-ridden hovel near Naples, where “the unspeakable glance of the Divine eyes met his.” After this John makes his way back to his home in the hills, to find the house deserted by the living, with Lauretta and their child lying dead of the plague. Following this personal tragedy  and the drama of the Molinos affair, the General of the Jesuit order advises John to return to England, to live quietly and to think no more of plunging again into the fires of religious conflict. As John takes his final leave from the General, both men can ponder on the conflicts and perils into which men are led when they struggle to bring the worlds of religion and politics into any degree of harmony.            

              The novel itself ends here, but there is an epilogue, and we are recalled to the framing narrative of the young Oxford scholar with whom we began. He tells us that nothing more was known about the remainder of Inglesant’s life after his return to England, until a document was discovered, written by somebody who had contact with John some years later. How this letter came to light we are not told, and it is not dated. It does not mention the crisis of James II’s reign and the end of the Stuart crown, so we must conjecture that it was written in the early  1680s. The writer of this document, whoever he was, attributes to John Inglesant a speech which is worth quoting at some length, as it evidently sets down Shorthouse’s views of the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic.

              This is the supreme quarrel of all. This is not a dispute between sects and kingdoms; it is a conflict within man’s own nature, between the noblest parts of man’s nature arrayed against each other. One the one side obedience and faith, on the other, freedom and reason. What can come of such a conflict as this but throes and agony ? …Maintaining dogma … this is what the Church of Rome has ever done. She has traded upon the highest instincts of humanity, upon its faith and love, its passionate remorse, its self-abnegation and denial, its imagination and its yearning for the unseen. It has based its system upon the profoundest truths, and upon this platform it has raised a power which has, whether foreseen by its authors or not, played the part of human tyranny, greed and cruelty. To support this system it has habitually set itself to suppress knowledge and freedom of thought. It has therefore, for the sake of preserving intact its dogma above all other things, constituted itself the enemy of the human race…The English Church offers the supernatural to all who choose to come. It is like the Divine Being Himself, whose sun shines alike on the evil and the good. Upon the altars of this Church the divine presence hovers as surely to those who believe it, as it does upon the splendid altars of Rome… It is not even a question of religious freedom only; it is a question of learning and culture in every form…As a Church it is unique; if suffered to drop out of existence, nothing like it can ever take its place…Terror and superstition are the invariable enemies of culture and progress. They are used as rods and bogies to frighten the ignorant and the base, but they depress all mankind to the same level of abject slavery.    

Here I think we see Shorthouse himself stepping out of the fictitious structure which he had created, and speaking directly as a man of the later nineteenth century, who is clearly afraid that the Catholic revival of his own time may become a force of damaging reaction, weakening the spiritual life which England has fostered, and returning to a form of Christianity which was a self-seeking power structure. 

              John Inglesant is an engaging and thought-provoking book. Not wildly exciting as a novel, it holds the attention throughout its considerable length, principally because it explores the deep and tangled relationships between civil society and religion. It shows us something which barely exists today, namely men and women who see their lives as being lived under the eyes of God, discerning a higher truth than day-to-day expediency, and struggling to reconcile with the imperfections of human life their sense of the divine. In this sense it succeeds, and it is a philosophical book as its author intended, but there are doubts and question-marks as to its complete success as a novel. Inglesant himself is not as strongly developed as he should be; he is at all times, calm, thoughtful, dignified and civilised, in contrast to many of the dramatic scenes he witnesses. If we ask what exactly he achieves for the causes which he serves – the Anglican and the Catholic – it is hard to find an answer. But this perhaps is the central point of the book: he is instructed by his mentors to devote his life to the service of two religious visions or traditions, but one in the end has to be defeated. The England of the first half of the book is not exactly attractive, pulled this way and that by contending factions, and threatened by various forms of chaos. In these earlier chapters, the author is not often concerned to use descriptive writing to evoke the life of seventeenth-century England. But with Italy it is an entirely different story, and the author offers us many colourful, dramatic or tragic evocations of the country and its people. Italy totally dominates the second half of the book, but in ways that are deeply ambiguous. Impressed, even enchanted, by Italy’s natural beauty, culture and artistic spirit, Iglesant also becomes keenly aware of its seductive, corrupting power, to the point where he recognises it as a civilisation that is partly Christian but also still partly pagan, while the hand of the Church lies heavily across the country, holding back reason and freedom. In the course of the novel, Inglesant slowly evolves his own religious ideals, captured in the passages on the Little Gidding community and on the teaching of Miguel Molinas, both expressions of deep spirituality and the inner life, but which are both terminated by outside force. There can be little doubt that Shorthouse identified himself with this tradition, and that he believed it to be alive in Anglicanism but not in Catholicism, where its had been largely stamped out. The contemporary message of the book is to defend High Anglicanism and to urge English Christians that the vogue for conversion to Rome, so evident in the years when the book was written, was ill-founded and unnecessary in view of the rich spiritual life of the Anglican tradition. This I think is the contemporary sub-plot that lay behind the writing of this curious and original novel. The book was a definite public success, selling many thousands of copies and enjoying a great vogue in Anglican circles. It would be interesting to know whether it engendered a great deal of resentment among Catholics. Shorthouse wrote a few other novels but none matched the success of this one. Today it is a curiosity from England’s religious past, which can be enjoyed as a historical novel, a work of the imagination which contains a very serious philosophical dimension