For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we
perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naivest passages the
workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye
which looks at history and the material world as though they had never
been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been
acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even
this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation
of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the
annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic
to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for
occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his,
only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling
over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. _Mansoul_ is all of a
piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will,
in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the
familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry: