LIONEL JOHNSON'S PROSE There were both disorder and defiance in Lionel Johnson's brief life, but to read this wise collection of his prose ^ is to wonder whether all the rebelliousness may not have been a sort of twisted barrier, behind which, as in a secret garden, he could grow the white flowers of an austere and untroubled art. A shining rectitude lies on all these pages, and a noble quiet ; the reader walks unwearied in the high, clear, wind- less atmosphere of reverie. Merely reviews, for the most part — done for different dailies and weeklies, and mostly anonymous — there is not one of them with an anxious or excessive line, and few that fail to achieve, in addition, what one of his own shining phrases calls " the severe beauty of a starry night." And it is scholar's script too — its aloofness fortified by knowledge, quickened by golden comparisons, and continually ennobled by the presence of royal phrases from the saints and the singers — from Crashaw, Aquinas, a Kempis — Milton's Latin, Lucian's Greek. Simply as a concourse of these things the book is a delight, and Johnson's own periods move among their " crested and prevailing " visitors with an air as com- posed and highbred as their own. Just a little too composed, perhaps. In a slight sleekness here and there — something almost complacent — one may detect a weakness ; it is sometimes as though an everyday idea, caught conversationally, had been brushed and
- Post Liminium. Essays and Critical Papers. By Lionel
Johnson. Edited by Thomas Whittemore (Elkin Mathews). 233
