Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/263

LIONEL JOHNSON'S PROSE 237 exquisitely arranged. But there has been no passionate distillation of the celestial honey hidden in the first. But come ! — do let us be proportionate. These things were only meant for journalism, and here we are testing them with reagents as drastic as those which he applied to the high masters. It is wonderful that they withstand them so well — and, for other reviewers, a model and a reproof; but it is not fair. And then, too, there is always his poetry — where, perhaps, the consecration was completed and the grail achieved. It is needful to remember that, in order to complete the picture. This prose of his was perhaps just an interspace, a compromise, a dim and subdued half -world. Cliiford's Inn sounds cloistered — but how far away is the snarl of Fleet Street? Life to a man like Johnson may well have seemed a rather hellish business ; his poetry is purely paradisal and here, in these pages, we are perhaps watching his beautiful spirit pacing coldly in the purgatory of its choice. Manchester Guardian, 1912.