THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 

 
 MAURICE HEWLETT
 
 ; •
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 BEING A CRITICAL REVIEW OF 
 HIS PROSE AND POETR Y % % % 
 BY MILTON BRONNER, % % % % 
 
 AUTHOR OF "LETTERS FROM THE RAVEN" 
 
 BOSTON, JOHN W. LUCE 
 AND COMPANY, MCMX
 
 Copyright, 1910, 
 
 by L. E, BASSETT 
 
 Bo9ton, Mass. U. S, A.
 
 TO 
 
 MY FATHER 
 
 715758
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 Biographical Note i 
 
 I. Earthwork Out of Tuscany g 
 
 II. Poems • 21 
 
 III. The Forest Lovers 35 
 
 IV. Pan And The Young Shepherd ... 46 
 
 V. Little Novels of Italy 59 
 
 VI. Richard Yea and Nay ........... 71 
 
 VIII. The Queen's Quair 99 
 
 VII. New Canterbury Tales 87 
 
 IX. The Road In Tuscany ....••••... 120 
 
 X. The Brazenhead Cyclus 132 
 
 XI. The Fool Errant 139 
 
 XII. The Stooping Lady ..•••• 154 
 
 XIII. The Spanish Jade 168 
 
 XIV. Halfway House 176 
 
 XV. Open Country, etc 187 
 
 XVI. Conclusion ig5
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 
 
 THERE are very few writers of today, 
 who have produced so much fine work, 
 concerning whom so little is known as in 
 the case of Mr. Maurice Hewlett. The liter- 
 ary journals have been singularly free from the 
 gossip so usual in th,e case of an author whose 
 books have come to be recognized as events 
 of more than ordinary importance. The reti- 
 cence of the man is best summed up in his 
 own modest words : 
 
 "I have refused to give journalists any de- 
 tails of my personal history or private circum- 
 stances, because I felt that they were trading 
 upon mere notoriety and proposing to feed the 
 public with what was not good for it — even if 
 it had an appetite. The business of critics, is to 
 criticise a writer as such, and not help out 
 h,is esthetic with facts which have really noth- 
 ing to do with the maker. I could write 
 novels with one eye quite as well as I could 
 with two." 
 
 To a certain extent, of course, Mr. Hew-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 lett is correct in his attitude. But there are 
 certain things concerning an author which it 
 is perfectly legitimate to know. It helps the 
 reader and student to reach, a just conclusion, 
 when he knows something about the family 
 history, the education, and the tastes of the 
 author under consideration. 
 
 "Who's Who," that friend of th,e busy edi- 
 tor, does very little to satisfy this legitimate 
 curiosity. One will find scores of lesser 
 authors more fully treated than the subject 
 of this book. Here is what it tells : — "Maurice 
 Henry Hewlett: Keeper of Land Revenue 
 Records and Enrolments, 1896-1900; born, 
 January 22, 1861 ; eldest son of Henry Gay 
 Hewlett of Shaw Hill, Addington, Kent; mar- 
 ried Hilda Beatrice, second daughter of Rev. 
 George William Herbert. Educated, London 
 International College, Spring Grove, Isles- 
 worth. Barrister, 1891. Publications: "Earth- 
 work Out of Tuscany," 1895; "The Masque of 
 Dead Florentines," 1895; "Songs and Medita- 
 tions," 1897; " The Forest Lovers," 1898; "Pan 
 and the Young Shepherd," 1898; "Little Novels 
 of Italy," 1899; "Richard Yea and Nay," 1900; 
 "New Canterbury Tales," 1901 ; "The Queen's 
 Quair," 1904; "The Road in Tuscany," 1904;
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 "Fond Adventures," 1905 ; "The Fool Errant," 
 1905; "Th,e Stooping Lady," 1907. 
 
 If to this, are added "The Spanish Jade" 
 and "Halfway House," igo8; "Artemision" 
 and "Open Country," 1909, the list is com- 
 plete. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett is in many ways English of 
 the English. The family had land in the bor- 
 ders of Somerset and Dorset for many cen- 
 turies. In fact, there is a person by the name 
 of Hewlett mentioned in the Domesday Book 
 of Somerset as holding land there and as hav- 
 ing held it in the time of Edward the Confes- 
 sor. It was a great grandfather of the novelist 
 who left the country and settled in London. 
 So far back as it has been possible to trace, 
 the Hewletts have always been Puritans and 
 Whigs. Mr. Hewlett's grandparents were 
 strictly so. His father fell under the influence 
 of Dr. Martineau and called himself nothing 
 more definite than a theist. Mr. Hewlett's 
 grandmother was one of the Gays of Norfolk, 
 a Huguenot French family. His father bore 
 the name, Henry Gay Hewlett, and it is not a 
 little curious that in the novelist's first great 
 popular success, "The Forest Lovers," the 
 hero bore th,e name Prosper le Gai.
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Henry Gay Hewlett, the father of the novel- 
 ist, was a student all his life, a writer of 
 verses, and a critic of no mean ability. It is 
 with no little interest that one picks up the 
 Contemporary Review, of December, 1874 to 
 read a critique by H. G. Hewlett upon the 
 poems of William Morris. One can readily 
 believe that a precocious boy, such as the 
 novelist is said to have been, would be in- 
 tensely interested in the magazine contribu- 
 tions by his father. The elder Hewlett, no 
 less than the present one, was interested in 
 medieval topics. It was this, doubtless, which 
 caused the poems of Morris to appeal to him, 
 at the same time that he deprecated the poems 
 of Swinburne, so savagely flayed in the same 
 magazine by Robert Buchanan. 
 
 Maurice Henry Hewlett, the eldest son of a 
 large family of children, must have been re- 
 marked early as one apt to follow in the foot- 
 steps of his father and grandfather, both of 
 whom were students of black letter law. As 
 early as the family can remember, Maurice 
 Hewlett began to read and to scribble. The 
 first book which he was noticed reading was 
 significantly enough the "Morte D'Artur. 
 At one time he knew it by heart and it un-
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 doubtedly had an influence not only upon h,is 
 future style, but upon his future studies. 
 Somewhere Mr. Hewlett says that he read 
 Shakespeare very early, "Tom Jones" too 
 early, and French when he was fourteen. He 
 read practically no poetry until he was 25. 
 As the net result of his reading, he has given 
 it as his opinion that his literary sponsoring 
 was t Mallory, the Bible, Quixote in English, 
 Sir Thomas Browne and Carlyle. The poets 
 whp influenced his style were Keats, Shelly, 
 Dante and the Italians of Dante's time. The lad 
 was educated largely in private schools. 
 School life, as such, was not much to his taste 
 and he cared little for the ordinary routine 
 lessons. He ended his student days without 
 a university degree. He says of this time of 
 his life: "I wasted my time, I dreamed; I tried 
 to do things too big for me, and threw them 
 up at the first failure; I diligently pursued 
 every false God; I don't think I was very 
 happy, and I am sure I was very disagreeable ; 
 I doubt now if I was ever a boy, except for a 
 short period when by rights I should have 
 been a man." 
 
 While he was dreaming and reading, he was 
 also writing by fits and starts. As a lad he
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 was supposed by his fond family to be able 
 to imitate anybody. It is recorded of him that 
 he once greatly surprised a lady who invited 
 him to a young folks' croquet party, by res- 
 ponding in Latin in the style of a letter in 
 Sallust or Livy. He was about 15 at the 
 time and with something like enthusiasm for 
 Latin. Later on he copied the manner of 
 Plato and at the age of 18 began the study 
 of law, but took his time about it, not being 
 finally called to the bar until 1891. By then, 
 he was not only thoroughly acquainted with 
 law itself — a fondness for which shows itself 
 in his novels — not only familiar with English 
 and French literature, but had begun that 
 study of Italian which was to become such a 
 passion with him. About this time he fell ill 
 and took those brief trips abroad which were 
 so largely to affect his subsequent career. 
 Contrary to th,e generally accepted opinion, 
 the longest visit he has ever paid Italy was 
 but of two months duration. Upon his return 
 in better health,, he began the practice of his 
 profession. Fitly enough, he lectured on 
 medieval thought and art at the South Ken- 
 sington University College and wrote re- 
 views for the critical journals upon subjects
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 which were congenial to him. As a reviewer 
 he was by no means gentle. Th,e same hon- 
 esty of purpose which has led him to call a 
 spade a spade in his novels, led him to pursue 
 a similar course in his reviewing work. It 
 is only necessary to take one example: In 1896, 
 the year after his "Earthwork" and the year 
 in which he secured a position in the Treas- 
 ury Department, Vernon Lee, a well known 
 writer on aesthetic subjects, issued a book 
 entitled "Renaissance Fancies and Studies." 
 It so happens that Miss Violet Paget (Vernon 
 Lee) is rather unappreciative of Botticelli, one 
 of Mr. Hewlett's heroes. This stirs him to 
 some vigourous writing in his review in the 
 Academy of March 21, 1896, one interesting 
 passage being as follows: "Her chapter on 
 Imaginative Art in th,e Renaissance, for in- 
 stance, proceeds upon a fallacy. A thing is 
 not imaginative because you get imaginative 
 stimulus out of it. The imaginative man 
 needs much less than a Giottesque fresco to 
 set his soul traveling. Indeed, one would be 
 inclined to say that imagination was most 
 nourished by the work it had to do, by the 
 need to fend for itself. * * A child will ride 
 to h, eaven on a broomstick; but the broom-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 stick does not take him. He, on the contrary, 
 takes the broomstick." 
 
 The rest of Mr. Hewlett's career since the 
 success of his "Forest Lovers" and his resigna- 
 tion from the Land Revenue office is simply 
 one of literary work, his time being engaged 
 in the production of his novels. 
 
 8
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY. 
 
 THERE is an apocryphal story concerning 
 Whistler which runs something like this : 
 A slight acquaintance brought up a 
 friend whom he wished to present to th,e great 
 painter. 
 
 "Mr. Whistler, this is Mr. Smith." 
 
 "I don't care," replied Whistler as he moved 
 away. 
 
 Presumably some of the I-don't-care-to- 
 know-you spirit possessed the critics at the 
 time Mr. Hewlett's first book — "Earthwork 
 Out of Tuscany" — appeared. A notice in the 
 Athenaeum of June 15, 1895 is representative 
 of the reception accorded the book by the 
 critics: 
 
 " 'Earthwork Out of Tuscany,' by Maurice 
 Hewlett (Dent & Company) will not, we fear, 
 appeal to many readers. Mr. Hewlett writes 
 mainly of Florence, a city that has been 
 'more written about' than any out of Italy, 
 
 excepting Cairo. His impressions and trans-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 lations are not interesting, and his style is 
 frequently affected and disagreeable. Th,e 
 best that can be said of the book is that it 
 shows a very proper sympathy with much that 
 is good in art ; but this will not make the book 
 a good one. In one place tb,e author modestly 
 speaks of his writings as watered wine, and 
 we must confess his modesty is not unbecom- 
 ing." 
 
 Today the weight of Maurice Hewlett's 
 name would doubtless cause the most cock- 
 sure of his critics to pause before dismissing 
 a book, from his hand, in any such cavalier 
 fashion; whjle even the dullest of them would 
 recall that the spell of Italy has whistled off 
 the creative imagination of every man of let- 
 ters who has breathed her air. To each she 
 h,as given some secret of her soul, though to 
 no two of them has the same whispered mes- 
 sage of enchantment come. 
 
 Italy to Byron represented the land where 
 a Lucretia Borgia wrote, "the prettiest love 
 letters in the world" to Cardinal Bembo, and 
 he heartily wished h,imself a Cardinal. To 
 Shelley, it meant Milan with its cathedral and 
 a quiet corner in it where he could read his 
 Dante. Heine, creating figures of women and 
 
 10
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 falling in love with his fictions, wrote of one 
 Italian city: "It seemed to me as thpugh the 
 whole town was nought else than a pretty 
 novel that I had once read — that, in truth, I 
 myself had created; and that I was bewitched 
 by my own phantasy, startled by the pictures 
 of my own conjuring." 
 
 To Landor, Italy meant th,at country in 
 which the little Assunta went bargaining for 
 the best olives, and where Petrarch and Boc- 
 caccio learnedly discussed the merits and de- 
 fects of Dante's work. 
 
 To Pater, it meant a place where a few 
 great painters had created masterpieces. In 
 our day, it means to Mr. Arthur Symons a 
 country filled with cities that are, as it were, 
 dead cities, cities to be considered as works 
 of art, whereas Mr. Hewlett considers them 
 as works of life. To Mr. Symons, people are 
 non-existent, or, if they "intrude," are a 
 source of annoyance. 
 
 To Mr. Hewlett, no city is complete with- 
 out its visions of the people who made it. 
 The landscape is not perfect without its ap- 
 pealing human figures. Italy, as he aptly says 
 in one place, is a country in which pictures 
 were lived. 
 
 ii
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 He recreates that old Italy for us. The 
 brilliancy with, which he does this, the sure- 
 ness of his touch,, the deep knowledge of land, 
 people and history that he displays, the in- 
 timacy of his revelations, stamp him, not as the 
 Anglo-Saxon writing of Italy as Browning 
 did, as George Eliot did, but as the most 
 Italianate of Englishmen. 
 
 His first book smacks somewhat of Pater 
 and Bourget, with a little of Lamb and of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, but to many there is 
 more of the Ruskin of the "Mornings in Flor- 
 ence" in it, than of any of the authors men- 
 tioned; revealed not so much in the style of 
 the English, as in the manner in which he ap- 
 proaches Italy, the joy he has in the works of 
 art that please him, the good humour it puts 
 him in to write of it. As not the least charm- 
 ing part of the "Mornings in Florence" is the 
 
 humourous little preface, so not the least de- 
 lightful portion of the "Earthwork" is the 
 
 sunny, light-hearted "Proem," an "apologia pro 
 libello suo": — "You take a boy out of school; 
 you set him to book-reading, give him Shakes- 
 peare and a Bible, set him sailing in the air 
 with the poets ; drench him with painter's 
 dreams, via, Titian's carmine and orange, Ver- 
 
 12
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 onese's rippling brocades, Umbrian morning 
 skies, and Tuscan hues wrought of moon- 
 beams and flowing water — anon you turn 
 him adrift in Italy, a country where all poets' 
 souls seem to be caged in crystal and set in 
 the sun w and say, 'Here, dreamer of dreams, 
 what of the day?' Madonna! You ask and 
 you shall obtain. I proceed to expand under 
 your benevolent eye." 
 
 Proceeding, he gives a criticism of some 
 painter's work; he exercises his ingenuity in 
 discussing poetry of the 15th century and 
 translating a stave or two; possibly with Lan- 
 dor in mind, he constructs one or two imagin- 
 ary conversations ; he gives a romantic in- 
 terpretation of what sculptures mean to him, 
 and finally two well-nigh perfect little things : 
 "Quattrocentisteria," and "A Sacrifice at Pra- 
 to," which is equally artistic in another vein, 
 recalling to mind by its sunny paganism cer- 
 tain golden pages in Pater's "Marius." And 
 all these things are written with such gaiety 
 of spirit one finds it hard to realize that the 
 author was not 21 but 33. The sun has gone 
 to the head of this sun-worshipper. Every- 
 thing is attractive to him in this sun-soaked 
 Tuscany. 
 
 13
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 "I may see my mistress Italy embowered 
 in a belfry, a fresco, the scope of a Piazza, 
 th,e lilt of a Stornello, the fragrance of a leg- 
 end. If I don't find a legend to hand I may, 
 as lief as not* invent one." 
 
 This sun-intoxicated writer is not of the 
 order of the aesthetes. He flouts at the sug- 
 gestion that "Art is some pale, remote virgin 
 who must needs shiver and withdraw at the 
 touch of actual life." To him the very founda- 
 tion of all great art is that it springs from 
 actual life; it is earthiness touched to ethe- 
 reality, to loveliness supreme, to sublimity by 
 the power of genius. He uses his common 
 sense. In considering a work of art he asks 
 is it well done, rather than is it well inten- 
 tioned? He does not hesitate to break a 
 lance with Mr. George Moore or with Ruskin 
 himself, when needs must. He will not 
 scruple to say that Ruskin's interpretation of 
 Botticelli's Judith is all wrong and boldly tell 
 the story he himself reads in this fine work. 
 And as he does, there drop such melodious 
 bits as this: "Here, on the weather-fretted 
 walls, a Delia Robbia blossoms out in natural 
 colours — blue and white and green. They 
 are Spring's colours. You need not go into
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 the Bargello to understand Luca and Andrea 
 at their happy task ; as well go into a botanical 
 museum to read the secret of April." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett has called this a book about 
 Tuscany. Coming still closer to the fact, it 
 might be said it is about Botticelli. 
 
 Botticelli the man, Botticelli the artist, and, 
 possibly, Botticelli the actor in various little 
 life-dramas, — these are th,e main topics of his 
 book. The painter's career is almost an ob- 
 session with Mr. Hewlett. He reverts to it 
 again and again. He even promises to write 
 at length some day a Botticelli story, a promise 
 thus far not kept. 
 
 A glimpse of Botticelli is caught in the 
 first of Mr. Hewlett's "conversations," "Of 
 Sheep Shearers," a little thing that presup- 
 poses more knowledge of Florentine art and 
 history than th,e average reader is apt to 
 possess. Yet, in the second line, there is such 
 a sentence as this, etching an entire picture: 
 "The little wistful mother spying for God in 
 her first born." 
 
 In the mouth of Luca Signorelli, Hewlett 
 h,as placed words that give the very attitude 
 with which the great painter was met in his 
 own day: " 'Tis a dreamer, sir, believe me, 
 
 15
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 a dreamer of virgin nights, who knows not 
 the oracle of a tense muscle nor the right 
 equivalent of a hairy chest. His gods are of 
 the cloister, and his goddesses have the va- 
 pours of a long-legged girl belated in the 
 nursery; they are all for your tremors and 
 swoonings, your lingering, fingering embrace- 
 ments of bosom friends. Aphroditissa ! Bones 
 of me, shall Aphrodite languish in a skimpy 
 skirt!" 
 
 Then follow two dramatic conversations in 
 which are brief glimpses of Simonetta, beloved 
 of Giuliano Medici, and of how her fate was 
 involved in the coil of Florentine history. 
 
 And finally comes the pearl of the book, the 
 lovely "Quattrocentisteria, (How Sandro Bot- 
 ticelli saw Simonetta in the Spring)." 
 
 As a painter at the court of Lorenzo Medici 
 there is no doubt that Botticelli saw Simon- 
 etta Vespucci. With a poet's right, Mr. Hew- 
 lett has conceived an altogether probable 
 situation and beautifully elaborated it into this 
 little gem. It is hardly to be called a short 
 story, a conte. Here, as everywhere, Mr. 
 Hewlett has differed somewhat in method 
 from the great prose stylist, Pater, whom 
 there is every evidence to believe the younger 
 
 16
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 man admired. Hewlett's style is all alive, all 
 glowing, all colourful. In his "Imaginary 
 Portrait," instead of gradually, almost stealth- 
 ily approaching his main theme, as Pater 
 would have done, he boldly pitches upon it in 
 the very second paragraph: — 
 
 "Up at the Villa, with brisk morning airs 
 rustling overhead, in the cool shades of trees 
 and lawns, it was pleasant to lie still, watch- 
 ing these things while a silky young exquisite 
 sang to his lute a not too audacious ballad 
 about Selvaggia, or Becchina and the saucy 
 Prior of Sant' Onofrio. He sang well too, 
 that dark-eyed boy; the girl at whose feet he 
 was crouched was laughing and blushing at 
 once ; and, being very fair, she blushed hotly. 
 She dared not raise her eyes, to look into his, 
 and he knew it and was quietly measuring 
 his strength — it was quite a comedy! At each 
 wanton refrain he lowered his voice to a whis- 
 per and bent a little forward. And the girl's 
 laughter became hysterical; she was shaking 
 with the effort to control herself. At last she 
 looked up with a sort of sob in her breath 
 and saw his mocking smile and the gleam 
 of the wild beast in his eyes. She grew white, 
 rose hastily and turned away to join a group 
 
 17
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of ladies sitting apart. A man with a heavy, 
 rather sullen face and a bush of yellow hair 
 falling over his forehead in a wave, was stand- 
 ing aside watching all th,is. He folded his 
 arms and scowled under his big brows; and 
 when the girl moved away his eyes followed 
 her." 
 
 * * jfr 
 
 "Such clear-cut, high beauty made him 
 ashamed; but her colouring (for h,e was a 
 painter) made his heart beat. She was no 
 ice-bound shadow of deity then! but flesh and 
 blood; a girl, a child, of timid, soft contours, 
 of warm roses and blue veins laced in a pearly 
 skin. And she was crowned with a heavy 
 wealth, of red-gold hair, twisted in great coils, 
 bound about with pearls, and smouldering 
 like molten metal where it fell rippling along 
 her neck." 
 
 So she is seen in the head painted by Bot- 
 ticelli,, an engraving from which graced the 
 original edition of "Earthwork." No reader 
 can well fail to perceive that here is a writer 
 with, something to say; a man possessed of 
 historic imagination; a romanticist who can 
 recreate dead and gone periods. "Quattro- 
 centisteria" is not a very dramatic story, hard- 
 
 18
 
 EARTHWORK OUT OF TUSCANY 
 
 ly a tale at all, and yet one may find more of 
 the real Renaissance in its few pages than in 
 many chapters in Symonds' more formal his- 
 tory of the Renaissance in Italy. 
 
 "A Sacrifice at Prato" is in an altogether 
 different vein. It is presumably a narrative 
 by a cultured stranger, a citizen of the Roman 
 empire, who has traveled not only in space 
 but in time as well. Mr. Hewlett h.ere en- 
 deavours to picture just how Catholic Italy, 
 with its worship of Christ and the Virgin, 
 would strike the cultivated Pagan, having an 
 intimate acquaintance with all the ancient 
 Greek myths. He shows h,ow at first it seems 
 to the Pagan that the people are rendering 
 homage to Dionysus the Redeemer, and to 
 Venus Genetrix, until he learns that the re- 
 ligious mainly worshipped a maimed and torn 
 god, whose wounds are bleeding, and then 
 he knows it can not be Dionysus, but "must 
 needs be the Divine Eros, concerning whom 
 Plato's words are yet with us. So I can under- 
 stand why he is so wise, why he suffers always, 
 and yet cannot be driven by torment, nor per- 
 suaded by sophisms to cease loving. For the 
 necessity of love is to crave ever; and he is 
 Love himself." 
 
 19
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 In this engaging style, the author manages 
 to gather much of Italy between the covers of 
 his little book. Some there are, who perhaps 
 imagine Mr. Hewlett spent long years in Italy 
 absorbing its spirit as the Brownings did. But 
 in this th,ey are mistaken. Hewlett has made 
 only short vacation trips in what is surely 
 one of the native lands of his spirit. He has 
 a theory that it is an advantage to see a coun- 
 try in brief visits. He believes that while one 
 thus feels the charm in every fibre of one's 
 being, he can more easily pick out the great, 
 salient facts about a land and its people. 
 
 However that may be, "Earthwork" is in- 
 deed builded of Italian earth ; it is genuine ; 
 there is no make-believe. And whether this 
 is seen in the ligh,t of after events or no, the 
 book seems to have within its pages the seed 
 of all the various kinds of artistry Mr. Hew- 
 lett was to bring to bear later upon larger and 
 more important works. 
 
 20
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES. 
 
 SONGS AND MEDITATIONS. 
 
 ARTEMISION. 
 
 AMONG the first writings of Mr. Hewlett, 
 as with so many Englishmen of letters, 
 were the poems written in the first flush 
 of his literary youth,- The question at once 
 suggests itself, How will this devotee of the 
 old things, this weaver of arras-like pictures, 
 write as a poet? In some of his finest prose 
 he is a Greek Pagan by way of the Italian 
 Renaissance. In his early poetry, does he 
 display the same passion for rich English,, 
 even to the touch of preciosity? Is he marked 
 by the love of lovely words until one imagines 
 him exclaiming fervently, — "I thank Heaven 
 for this beautiful English word?" 
 
 These questions can best be answered by an 
 examination of his verse, by an appeal to "A 
 Masque of Dead Florentines," issued in 1895, 
 to "Songs And Meditations," published in 
 1896 and to "Artemision," 1909. Despite the 
 
 21
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 fact that the publication date of the "Songs" 
 is later than that of the "Masque," there are 
 numerous signs that it is a gathering of the 
 author's earliest work. 
 
 The young author, so soon afterwards to 
 make fame for himself as a creator of entranc- 
 ing feminine characters in fiction, was at this 
 time in love with youth and young, growing 
 things, with, girl goddesses, little children, and 
 fair flowers. Seemingly he was scarce aware 
 that he dwelt in busy, commercial England. 
 One must tread softly! Here in this forest 
 the fair Clytie mourned. There Ariadne was 
 forsaken. Coming through that coppice, oh 
 wonder of wonders! one might intrude upon 
 the fair Artemis herself, in all the glory of her 
 deathless young body. 
 
 While the poet's dreams were mainly of 
 Greece, and of Italy of Dante's day he had read 
 and adored Keats and Shelley. He had studied 
 the early Italians. He was familiar with the 
 Elizabethan and Jacobean song-writers. He 
 admired Donne and Crashaw and the courtier 
 poets of Charles' day. At times in h,is Latinity 
 and his preference for odes, he recalls the late 
 Francis Thompson. If Mr. Hewlett is a Greek 
 Pagan by way of the Italian Renaissance, ap- 
 
 22
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 propriately enough the "Songs" contain many 
 Greek studies. They are Greek more often 
 not so much in feeling as in subject, Greek 
 as a cultured Italian of the Renaissance 
 would write. His youth,, his love for nature, 
 and his English blood are shown by the prod- 
 igality with which he adorns his pages with 
 fair English blossoms. He celebrates th,e 
 crocus; he writes a study in white like this, 
 worthy of a painter trying his hand at verse: 
 
 "White flowers, white flowers to deck my 
 lady fair ! 
 
 Clematis for her hair 
 
 A cluster of vale lilies for her bosom 
 
 With apple blossom; 
 
 Th,en out of open fields and grassy places 
 
 Pick her moon-daisies, 
 
 And make a wreath 
 
 With columbines and roses white as death; 
 
 Thus she will be 
 
 Smother'd in flower-foam, and live fra- 
 grantly." 
 
 Herrick was more graceful and a greater 
 poet, but he was no fonder of flowers. 
 
 The young Hewlett has conned his Cavalier 
 poets and writes : "That Stone Walls Can Nev- 
 er Separate Him From His Lady," "His Lady 
 
 23
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 A Thief," and "Having Lost His Lady." In 
 memory of his Italian, he writes canzone and 
 stornelli, and translates the dirge of Politian 
 for the dead Lorenzo. There is little here to 
 suggest the modern English, poet, save it be 
 one in his fledgling years trying his wings, 
 imitating the old masters until he finds him- 
 self. The most modern note in this verse is 
 sounded in "War Songs for the English" in 
 which, America is called upon to join England 
 in a "rally." "Ariadne Forsaken" has the 
 very sound of some of the great Greek choral 
 numbers : 
 
 "Woman that liveth to love, to trust, and 
 
 to cling, 
 Being forsworn, 
 Choketh the tears as they start, 
 Masketh, the glint of her passion, traileth 
 
 her wing 
 As a bird, grieveth apart, 
 Tearless, voiceless, forlorn,. 
 Ripple of laughing and speech hath she to 
 
 love ; but to mourn, 
 Tempest of sighs, and labouring bosom, and 
 
 shorn 
 Hair, and dead heart." 
 
 24
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 In an entirely different vein are the closing 
 lines of his "Hymn to Artemis," modern 
 where the other is Greek, and one of the 
 numerous tributes paid by him to women, as 
 fine as those minute descriptions scattered 
 through his prose. 
 
 Contrasting with these pictures suggested 
 by Greek subjects are the following opening 
 lines of a poem entitled "Donna E. Gentil:" 
 
 "Thy lonely virginal air, 
 
 And thy vague eyes, 
 
 The carven stillness of thy sorrowful mouth,, 
 
 And sanctity of thy youth, , 
 
 Mark thee for no man's prize: 
 
 Set thee apart to be fair, 
 
 Holy, lovely, and wise." 
 
 In this there is the slow solemn music so 
 apt to be associated with a study of Dante or 
 a poem founded on his words, although,, too, 
 the lines themselves have something of Ver- 
 laine, when he is purest and most ench?.iting. 
 So again Dante suggests a poem and under the 
 title "Nessun Maggior Dolore" there is this 
 version of th,e famous lines : 
 
 25
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 "Never a sharper grief 
 
 Than remembrance of happy things 
 
 When our misery stings 
 
 And wounds ache for relief." 
 
 It greatly excells the Carey version: 
 
 "No greater grief than to remember days 
 Of joy, when misery is at hand." 
 
 Besides these verses, th,e book contains 
 chants from plays projected or, perhaps, partly 
 finished, sonnets and formal odes. Two 
 poems distinguished by their simplicity best 
 indicate what direction Hewlett's talents as 
 poet might have taken. One is a "Dirge" 
 reminiscent distantly of William Morris in 
 the best Pre-Raphaelite manner of the Guene- 
 vere volume. "For Cecco Sleepy" is an ex- 
 quisite lullaby, a tune of childhood, with a 
 drowsy lilting melody, nodding with its repe- 
 titions : 
 
 "Cecco's eyes begin to blink, 
 Lay him down, lay him down! 
 Tired little head must sink, 
 Little golden crown. 
 
 26
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 "Cecco plays the valiant part, 
 All th,e day, all the day! 
 That's an eager little heart 
 Tired out with play." 
 
 Long before Mr. Hewlett had made trips 
 to Italy, he had sympathetically studied the 
 great Italian poets. Dante he knew and loved; 
 Pulci, Poliziano and other Florentines he read 
 also in th,e original Italian. 
 
 "A Masque of Dead Florentines, wherein 
 some of Death's Choicest Pieces, and the 
 Great Game that he played therewith, are 
 fruitfully set forth," gives the impression of 
 being, in verse of the most epigrammatic sort, 
 the definite result of these studies in the Ital- 
 ian Renaissance. It was the poetical re- 
 sult of it, just as "Earthwork" and "Little 
 Novels of Italy" were the prose. The book 
 crept quietly into print in 1895. It is doubtful 
 whether any big literary publication even 
 mentioned it. It is a peculiar work in English 
 literature. Mr. Hewlett plays with the thought 
 of death. For Beddoes, such themes were an 
 obsession; in fact he was Death's veritable 
 liegeman. Mr. Frank T. Marzials, in a unique 
 set of sonnets entitled. "Death's Disguises," 
 
 27
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 has pictured Death disguised as a courtier, as 
 a love-god, as a fool, as a harlot, etc. Mr. 
 Hewlett treats of Death, as the conqueror of 
 all the famous Florentines who made their 
 city what it was in history, art and song. He 
 makes the reader think at times of "Every- 
 man"and of "The Dance of Death." By the 
 very nature of its subject and treatment, the 
 "Masque" is placed beyond the chance of pop- 
 ularity, presupposing as it does an entire 
 familiarity with, or at least an interest in, 
 the great names in Florentine art, poetry and 
 statecraft. Each of the heroes marches 
 through its pages, explaining the very core 
 of his life and aspirations in a quatrain, as 
 worthy the term "epigram" as the somewhat 
 famous early book of them by Mr. William 
 Watson. It has been pointed out by Walter 
 Pater that the great Florentines, and, indeed, 
 all the natives of the famous city, were pre- 
 occupied with the thought of death. As proof 
 of this it is only necessary to refer to the ter- 
 rible "Pageant of Death" held in 15 12, des- 
 cribed by Vasari at length. 
 
 It is perhaps not wrong to conjecture that 
 a knowledge of the details of this famous 
 pageant and its song, coupled with a poet's 
 
 28
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 genuine insight into the Florentine heart and 
 mind, led Mr. Hewlett to th,e composition of 
 his very original and strange "Masque" in 
 which the persons are given as "a chorus of 
 tired ladies and poets forgotten," "the Floren- 
 tine Shades," "A Herald," "Three Re- 
 proaches" and "King Death." It is not hard 
 to see from this that it is a macabre book, 
 a book that would make the ordinary reader 
 approach it with a shudder. To this mixture 
 of masque and morality play, which in a 
 measure tells of the downfall of Florence 
 from its exalted place, there is, strictly speak- 
 ing, no action at all. The chorus stands in 
 a ruined garden in winter. One by one the 
 famous men and some few women famed in 
 poetry and story, pass by, each with a quat- 
 rain on his or her lips. These quatrains are 
 often taken up and elaborated by chorus as in 
 the Greek play.. Chorus tells the story of 
 Dante and his Beatrice, chimes in with the 
 fair Simonetta, chants a dirge for Florence 
 fallen. The ingenuity of the poet is displayed 
 by the fact that each of the quatrains ends 
 either with the word of doom, "dead" or 
 "death," and yet there is no feeling of mon- 
 otony, but only the cumulative and chilling 
 
 29
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 effect of the sense of inevitableness the author 
 wishes to convey. 
 
 The first of the great shades to pass is 
 that of Dante. It would seem impossible to 
 compress within the narrow limits of a qua- 
 train the story of such a great soul, — yet 
 read: 
 
 "The first to speak in Florence, Florence 
 spurn'd 
 
 My song and service. From home to out- 
 land turn'd, 
 
 I sensed God's secrets, eating salted bread. 
 
 God woke my love by death; they crown'd 
 me dead." 
 
 Chorus then takes up the theme and here is 
 part of its comment: 
 
 "And that great utterance he said 
 Liveth, and he who saw the dead 
 Cannot taste death; for Death's hand shook 
 To feel the burden of his book." 
 
 The power and beauty of that last sen- 
 tence need little tribute. The true poet speaks 
 in the words. It is one of the most vivid 
 
 30
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 and truly poetical lines writen by any of the 
 younger men. Here is the secret of Petrarch, 
 carver of lovely sonnets: 
 
 "My voice was as th,e swan's that dirgeth 
 
 death ; 
 My joys were frail things, lighter than a 
 
 breath. 
 But, like the night, I froze them to a 
 
 brede — 
 They wove me crowns thereof, and wrapt 
 
 me dead." 
 
 Of the third of the great Florentine triad, 
 he writes in a more romantic and passionate 
 vein, as is proper in dealing with the 
 great amorist and romancer of the Decam- 
 eron: 
 
 "Heavy the blossoms, sultry-sweet the wine, 
 And all the air gold-dusted with sun-shine. 
 I found a girl's warm bosom for my head, 
 And — God was good! I lov'd till I was 
 dead." 
 
 To have done with the poets and turn to 
 other great names, here are the sinister and 
 
 3i
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 sfyuddersome words put into the mouth of the 
 poet Pulci: 
 
 "Let who wins laugh; I laugh'd at Heaven 
 
 and Earth. 
 Dante saw Grief and lov'd her; I chose 
 
 Mirth. 
 Mirth and I laugh'd till we were out of 
 
 breath, 
 And left one laughing still — th,e jester, 
 
 Death." 
 
 "Macchiavellian" has pased into the lan- 
 guage as a synonym for all that is tricky, 
 subterranean, crafty, and mean. To few who 
 use the word does it occur that there may 
 have been tragedy in tb,e Italian statesman's 
 life, and yet: 
 
 "That kings miight feast I sweated God 
 
 away; 
 To insolent stripling feet I bow'd my 
 
 grey 
 Wise brows. A smirk, a shrug, a wagging 
 
 head — 
 I used this way; they use it on me dead." 
 
 32
 
 A MASQUE OF DEAD FLORENTINES 
 
 "The Masque" presents a novel note in 
 latter day literature. It at least does not 
 sedulously play the ape to the work of any 
 19th century giants. It shows an original and 
 independent method of work; a desire to 
 strike out into new paths, regardless of the 
 prevailing fashion. 
 
 Although Mr. Hewlett once wrote in depre- 
 ciative vein of his earliest verses, he surprised 
 his closest readers by reissuing many of the 
 poems in "Artemision," published in April, 1909 
 all the poems being devoted to Artemis, and a 
 note explaining that all had been written be- 
 fore 1898. The three long idylls, not hitherto 
 published, deal respectively with the story of 
 Callisto, with the sorrows of Niobe, and with 
 Endymion. They are marked, of course, by 
 a familiarity with Greek legend that is to be 
 expected, and by an ecstasy of nature-worship 
 that is not so very common in these days. 
 But the idylls are not truly Greek as Keats 
 and Swinburne and Arnold are in some of 
 their work. There are disenchanting modern- 
 isms such as "The Chant Royal of Hymnia's 
 praise" and the line in which he speaks of the' 
 Niobids' "Muezzin call to prayer." 
 
 Singularly enough a criticism of the volume 
 
 33
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 stung him into one of his rare replies to 
 critics. A writer in the London Times, while 
 conceding him the passion, the accomplish- 
 ment, and the command of verbal magic which 
 might mean great poetry, attacked his treat- 
 ment of his theme, saying the purity of his 
 
 Artemis was shown, not as a virtue, a force, 
 but as a negation; and that his real topic 
 
 was not the beauty of purity so much as the 
 shamefulness of passion. Part of Hewlett's 
 reply is significant for the light it casts upon 
 his fictional heroines as well as for its exposi- 
 tion of the meaning of "Artemision: — " 
 
 "The Greeks had two virgin goddesses — 
 Athena of Attica and Artemis of Arcady. The 
 virginity of Athena, as I read the myths in 
 Attic literature, was 'a virtue, a force' (to 
 quote your reviewer) ; that of Artemis was 
 precisely 'a negation.' Athena stood for the 
 idea of deliberate virginity, Artemis for the 
 innate virginity of all healthy young creatures 
 — to my mind a more beautiful, if not more 
 interesting, conception. It is this, absolutely 
 which I have set myself to exhibit in various 
 phases. The 'morals,' as your reviewer right- 
 ly says, are neither here not there. They are 
 mine; the goddess has need of none." 
 
 34
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS. 
 
 MR. HEWLETT'S first novel appeared 
 in 1898. Up to that time he had written 
 few books and these were addressed to 
 the small and select coterie which would read 
 aesthetic appreciations of Italian art and life, 
 and the poetic excursions of a talented youth 
 filled with a love for the gods of Greece and 
 the exquisite legends concerning them. 
 There was seemingly in Mr. Hewlett the 
 making of a younger Pater, who would devote 
 his spare moments to lectures on medieval 
 topics and to printing occasional essays as 
 the fruit of his studies upon such themes. 
 Certainly one would not have predicted that 
 the author of "Earthwork" was destined to 
 become one of the great romanticists of the 
 day. 
 
 But granting his ambition to write romance, 
 there is not much cause for wonder at the 
 direction he chose. From boyhood on his 
 mind had been attracted toward certain kin- 
 
 35
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 dred writers. As a mere lad he had adored 
 Mallory. 
 
 "The Forest Lovers" is a direct and belated 
 offshoot of the Pre-Raphaelite school, which 
 itself was a direct phase of the general roman- 
 tic movement which swept all over Europe. 
 The German and French romanticists had an 
 especial love for Catholicism and for Italy, 
 for medieval times and for Pre-Raphaelite 
 painters like Botticelli and Ghirlandajo. Hew- 
 lett loved these topics too. Non-conformist 
 and Huguenot ancestors did not inspire Mr. 
 Hewlett with a hatred of Catholicism. On 
 the other hand, his attitude is one of constant 
 reverence and friendliness. He is temperamen- 
 tally and intellectually akin to the continental 
 members of th,e romantic school. But he is also 
 in direct touch with the English Pre-Raphael- 
 ites, those innovators who sought in their 
 creations to revive the forgotten world of old 
 romance, the world of wonder and mystery 
 and spiritual beauty. The keynote of the 
 work was indeed, what Theodore Watts- 
 Dunton called "The renascence of wonder." 
 
 In many ways William Morris was the 
 healthiest and best member of this school. 
 He took for his chief models Chaucer, Mai- 
 
 36
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 lory, and the old French romances. Medieval 
 art often has a dreamy beauty, something that 
 is faint and shadowy, and it is this kind of 
 beauty that marks the first medieval stories 
 by Morris, contributed to the Oxford and 
 Cambridge Magazine. In these tales Morris 
 attempts to hark back to old times and to re- 
 create the atmosphere of a dead era. The 
 stories are charming, but not convincing. 
 One doubts whether the characters in them 
 would bleed if wounded. The romance of 
 the Guenevere volume is more robust and 
 more colourful, deriving as it does from the 
 old ballads. 
 
 Now it is precisely the work of Mallory and 
 of Morris that inspired Mr. Hewlett. The 
 youth who knew Mallory by heart, had his 
 attention directed to Morris by no less a 
 critic than his own father, who said Morris, 
 had "saturated his imagination with the glow 
 of chivalric romance and Catholic mythol- 
 
 ogy." 
 
 The homesickness for the Middle Ages these 
 authors created in the boy remained in the 
 man. He determined to write a Pre-Raphael- 
 ite romance, but one touched by the humour 
 and the alertness of the 19th century. Mr. 
 
 37
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 Hewlett went back to medieval well-springs 
 of thought and emotion, but he cast aside 
 medieval iteration. He placed his narrative 
 vaguely in the Middle Ages, but he dropped a 
 certain childish naivete characteristic of 13th 
 century narratives. He used all the old prop- 
 erties of the romantic stage, but h,e told his 
 tale in a spirit of fantastic ideality. He used 
 a language that smacked neither of the War- 
 dour street phase of Morris's career, nor of 
 that later period when Morris was enamoured 
 of Anglo-Saxon words to the exclusion of 
 all oth,ers. Mr. Hewlett took his words from 
 many sources and used a fragrant and ruddy 
 English that was a delight to read, despite the 
 fact that at times it verged upon the precious. 
 Some critics saw only the preciosity. 
 
 In England the reviews were, however, in 
 the main friendly. In fact, on January 14, 
 1899 "The Academy" crowned the book as 
 one of th,e three best productions of the year 
 and gave its author 50 guineas. The other 
 crowned books for 1898 were Mr. Sidney 
 Lee's "Life of Shakespeare," and Mr. Joseph 
 Conrad's "Tales of Unrest." In crowning 
 "The Forest Lovers," the editor of "The 
 Academy" praised it especially for its "brave 
 
 38
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 front," something not too common in English 
 literature, although among the moderns, Bor- 
 row, Whitman and Stevenson were pointed out 
 as possessing it. 
 
 The purchasing public liked the novel even 
 better than the critics. The book showed Mr. 
 Hewlett as a master of the romantic form. Fol- 
 lowing his own definition, in his consideration 
 of De Stendhal's novels, Mr. Hewlett displayed 
 a love of adventure, a keenness of dramatic 
 sense, a feeling for atmosphere, and a rapid- 
 ity of movement not surpassed in his day. 
 Futhermore it was real romance, not pseudo- 
 romance that he gave his readers. This is 
 neither the time nor the place for /an ex- 
 tended discussion of what is meant by the 
 term "real romance." Its definition is one 
 th,at has troubled many writers about litera- 
 ture and a clear-cut explanation is yet to 
 seek. The best is not a definition at all. It 
 is a comparison, however, which throws a 
 clear light upon the subject. It is by the 
 late Mr. John Davidson and is as follows : — 
 
 "Romanticism bears somewhat the same 
 relation to romance that sentimentality bears 
 to sentiment." 
 
 In Mr. Hewlett's first novel there is real ro- 
 
 39
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 mance, just as there is genuine sentiment in- 
 stead of namby-pamby sentimentalism. "The 
 Forest Lovers," despite its medieval tone, 
 has a theme which recommends it to the suf- 
 frages of modern readers. Like the pastour- 
 elles of the 12th and 13th centuries, it deals 
 with a certain sort of love. "The pastourelles," 
 one writes, "were a special variety of love 
 story of the kind so curiously popular in all 
 medieval languages, and so curiously alien 
 from modern experience, where a passing 
 knight sees a damsel of low degree, and 
 woos her at once, with or without success." 
 It is to be added that there was a develop- 
 ment of the theme in which, the maiden proved 
 to be not low, but of high degree, as, for in- 
 stance, in that masterpiece of the Middle Ages, 
 the lovely "Aucassin and Nicolete." "The 
 Forest Lovers," is a prose pastourelle, if the 
 term may be allowed. 
 
 It struck a fresh note at the time it ap- 
 peared. People had become accustomed to 
 the minute realism of Hardy, to the dazzle 
 of Meredith, to the strangeness of Kipling's 
 India, to the humble human comedy of Bar- 
 rie's Thrums, to the toy kingdoms of Hope. 
 
 Th,e public was ready for a story of pure 
 
 40
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 romance, laid in that no man's land of dreams 
 which is sometimes the most real of all lands. 
 The author did not try to deceive his readers. 
 On the very first page of his book he set forth 
 in brief just what he proposed to tell: 
 
 "My story will take you into times and 
 spaces alike rude and uncivil. Blood will 
 be spilled, virgins suffer distresses; the horn 
 will sound through woodland glades ; dogs, 
 wolves, deer and men, Beauty and the Beasts 
 will tumble each other, seeking life or death 
 with their proper tools. There should be mad 
 work, not devoid of entertainment." 
 
 The promise here made is well kept. It is 
 a Forest of Arden book. There are hints of 
 New Forest, but there is more of Morte 
 D'Artur in it and something besides of Mr. 
 Hewlett's own. The book is brave with the 
 sunlight of the open lawny spaces, sweet with 
 the fragrant breezes of the forest's green 
 alleys. It is a story of love, of love over- 
 whelming. At first it almost seems it is going 
 to exemplify an Ibsen saying: "To love, to 
 sacrifice all and to be forgotten — that is 
 women's saga." 
 
 Isoult, the heroine, is the kind of woman of 
 whom such a saying is true. But she inspires 
 
 4i
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 a love that will not forget and will not rest — 
 and that makes the story. The tale is far 
 from being a perfect one. It is full of the 
 kind of weakness a first novel is apt to have. 
 Its chapter on Spiridion reads as if it might 
 have been written by some pale German ro- 
 manticist. Its characters often do things 
 that can only be accounted for on the theory 
 that if they had acted otherwise the story 
 would have come to an untimely end early 
 in the chapter. But the crudest thing in the 
 book, a crudity of which Mr. Hewlett was 
 never again guilty, was the mingled symbol- 
 ism and coincidence in a series of happen- 
 ings. 
 
 But enough of the disagreeable if necessary 
 and thankless work of the advocatus diaboli. 
 Perhaps the more sensible way to treat of 
 the book would be to consider: Taken as a 
 whole does it charm; does it carry one along 
 breathlessly from incident to incident unto 
 th,e happy end? The answer is, of course, in 
 the affirmative. The book does charm with 
 a score of graces. It has the grace of style. 
 It has the lovely grace of youth. Indomitable 
 youth sings in every line of it. It has the 
 grace of the poet who loves nature, who joys 
 
 4*
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 in the changing spells the forest casts, who 
 loves Love and all his almoners . It has th,e 
 grace of humour and fun, which, is very un- 
 Morrisian, to coin an uncouth phrase. 
 
 It has the charm of introducing the second in 
 Mr. Hewlett's wonderful gallery of women, — 
 Isoult, a woman almost all flesh and blood, 
 although living in the arras world of faery. 
 
 This is because the work is more than th,e 
 clever "fake," which the author himself once 
 lightly pronounced it. There is something 
 more in it than a fairy story of a Mallory 
 world. Red blood flows in the veins of some 
 of its characters. Real emotions are felt. 
 Real moral battles are fought and won. It 
 is a story of a knight who rescues and weds a 
 maid in distress. Various villains pursue her, 
 this one for lust, that one for fortune. The 
 beggar maid is revealed as a princess in her 
 own right. The significant figures are Pros- 
 per and Isoult la Desirous, who was de- 
 sirous of the love of the man who wedded her 
 to save her from villains. Brandes says of 
 certain German authors : "the love of the Ro- 
 manticists is a refined and chastened love, 'the 
 art of love.' " There is no such love in Pros- 
 pers case. There is no love at all at 
 
 43
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 first. There is simply lust of the eye. He is 
 chastened by longing. He is taught by ex- 
 perience. Only gradually does he learn that 
 woman's love means to love a man and be 
 silent; to serve him gladly; to suffer for him, 
 if need be, die for him, but always in all 
 sweetness of spirit and holiness of soul. It 
 is the necessity for the lesson the hero must 
 learn that gives Mr. Hewlett the opportunity 
 for a fine scene between Prosper and her who 
 has been his wife in name only, a scene in 
 which she shows him to himself, as one not 
 loving but lustful, not claiming her as wife but 
 with hot desire as for a leman. 
 
 The woman is thus shown to have the 
 deeper character. Prosper is merely a light- 
 hearted, thoughtless, healthy young animal, 
 who loves beauty, who loves a fight, who 
 loves mastery. But Isoult is more complex. 
 Well born, she remembers nothing but a life 
 of sordid misery and privation. Virginal in 
 heart and soul, she has been harried all her 
 young life, because of the fatal gift of beauty, 
 a curse rather than a blessing in a world of 
 medieval manners and men. She is lovely 
 even in her rags. She is breeched as a boy, a 
 minor Rosalind, whose two chief words in 
 
 44
 
 THE FOREST LOVERS 
 
 connection with her lord are "love" and 
 "serve." She endures beatings at the hands 
 of charcoal-burners rather than reveal her 
 sex; nameless outrages at the hands of a 
 heartless mob rather than reveal the real re- 
 lation between herself and Prosper. She is 
 faithful in all ways; ready to be faithful unto 
 death. She is Mr. Hewlett's medieval woman, 
 lovely and loving and meek. And after all 
 she is simply a child, her heart unchilled and 
 her mind untainted by the evil sh,e has read 
 in men's eyes and the foulness she has heard 
 from men's mouths. 
 
 The success of "The Forest Lovers," did 
 more than determine the career of Mr. Hew- 
 lett. It was directly responsible for a school 
 of card-board medieval fiction whose chief 
 exponents are still busy writing tales to fit 
 coloured plates in the magazines. But these 
 stories are lacking in the qualities that won 
 for Mr. Hewlett. In "The Forest Lovers," 
 despite all crudities and mannerisms, the sun- 
 light that shines down the dappled ways has 
 real warmth; the breeze has real strength; 
 beneath the bodices of rich cloth and the suits 
 of durable armour, hearts beat that are stirred 
 by real love and real hate. 
 
 45
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD. 
 
 PAN and the Young Shepherd" is one 
 of the finest things Mr. Hewlett has 
 done. When the chapter on his work 
 is finally closed and the last assay made, this 
 will not be counted among the least of his 
 achievements. 
 
 Th,e works on poetics say that pastoral 
 drama is a thing done best in Elizabethan and 
 Jacobean times. The student is referred to Jon- 
 son and Fletcher and is told that this sort of 
 thing is not written in modern days. He is 
 even informed that eclogues and idylls, after 
 the Theocritean manner, are outmoded. 
 People no longer pretend to believe in shep- 
 herds who discourse wisely and sweetly of 
 life and love and death; who play the oaten 
 pipe under spreading trees, while they dream 
 of the great elemental things of this world. 
 
 Shepherds call to mind their patron god, 
 the great god Pan, and readers are told in 
 melodious verse that Pan is dead, that the 
 
 46
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 Christian era killed him, just as it sent Apollo 
 to slave in Picardy, and drove other gods 
 into exile. 
 
 Of all said regarding the writing of pastoral 
 drama in this modern day, this passage is 
 the truest: 
 
 "It must be realistic to a certain degree 
 
 Then it must be romantic, too, with, the ro- 
 mance of nature, with that feeling for the 
 strangeness and mystery of the deep woods 
 and open uplands that is one of the notes of 
 the poetry of this century. Then, probably it 
 must be idealistic, in that each, figure and 
 character must be surcharged with the feeling 
 and atmosphere of some mood or tendency 
 in thought; for that is something we cannot 
 escape now. And it should also be classic; 
 for th,e pastoral is a traditional form; it re- 
 minds us of the best periods of our literature. 
 It is a form moulded by the touch of masters 
 who are classic." 
 
 The writer of this definition frankly says it 
 is not an a priori formula, but one deduced 
 from a perusal of "Pan." It is something to 
 have done so well as to supply an acute 
 critic with the material for a new formula. 
 And how well Mr. Hewlett illustrates it! He 
 
 47
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 is realistic in his rustics, idealistic in his lov- 
 ers, romantic in his worship of nature, classic 
 in his following of models hallowed by time, 
 and the best judgment of the ablest critics, 
 Yes, the pastoral is possible today, — when a 
 Hewlett writes it. 
 
 He has worked in prose, on the whole, 
 where the classic authors worked in poetry, al- 
 though, of course Mr. Hewlett's method is that 
 of the poet. For the nonce, he has believed 
 in Pan. It is almost as if Robert Louis Steven- 
 son had foreseen the condition under which a 
 modern man would produce a Pan Play: 
 
 "The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, 
 now terriblly stamping his foot, so th,at 
 armies were dispersed; now by the woodside 
 on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until 
 he charmed the hearts of the upland plough- 
 men. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered 
 the last word of human experience. To cer- 
 tain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion 
 and elastic ethers,, and the hypothesis of this 
 and that spectacled professor, tell a speaking 
 story; but for youth and all ductile and con- 
 genial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the 
 classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; 
 goat-footed with a gleeful and angry look, 
 
 48
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 the type of the shaggy world; and in every 
 wood, if you go with a spirit properly pre- 
 pared, you shall hear the note of his pipe." 
 
 It is exactly in this ductile and congenial 
 mood of youth, that Mr. Hewlett entered that 
 fancy-land : — 
 
 "Scene, pastoral country: Champney Val- 
 tort in Pascency, and the hills about it. Time, 
 what you will." 
 
 Here in this land dwell peasants, pagan at 
 heart and with a thin veneer of Christianity; 
 here dwells Neanias, with an unearthly strain 
 in his blood; here Pan is at his eternal play, 
 the laughing god to those who yield to him, 
 the angry immortal to those who seek to 
 thwart his will. 
 
 Take Jonson's exquisite fragment of "The 
 Sad Shepherd" as an exemplar for compar- 
 ison's sake and see how faithfully Mr. Hew- 
 lett has followed classic models. He makes 
 his shepherd boy, Neanias, discourse in prose 
 that is touched by the fire of poetry. Jonson's 
 sad shepherd, Aeglamour, speaks in divine 
 verse such as no peasant ever uttered save in 
 the pages of the masters. 
 
 Jonson did not shrink from injecting humour 
 into his pastoral, declaring in his prologue: 
 
 49
 
 MAURICfE HEWLETT 
 
 "But fere's an heresy of late let fall, 
 That mirth by no means fits a pastoral." 
 
 Even as Jonson did not hesitate, so, too the 
 modern poet has used humour, racy of the 
 soil, to enliven his little play. And finally, 
 just as Jonson introduced supernatural beings 
 in the shape of Robin Goodfellow and his 
 mistress, the witch, so in the later production, 
 there are Pan and the seven daughters of 
 earth. 
 
 Despite this following of classic models, 
 despite the odd snatches of verse with which 
 each, act is prefaced, despite the old English 
 which is sometimes spoken, and the atmos- 
 phere of old time which is conveyed, the poet 
 remains a modern, too. He can not escape 
 his age entirely. He is filled with the modern 
 love of nature, in addition to a pagan wor- 
 ship of nature-forces, amounting to pantheism 
 He is alive also to the modern tendencies, to a 
 symbolism which is not often easily ex- 
 pounded; which is felt, but not explainable. 
 Whether he would or no, in "Pan" Mr. Hew- 
 lett is brother to Maeterlinck of the early 
 plays and William Sharp of the "Vistas." 
 
 One expounder called this pastoral merely 
 
 50
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 a weaker "Forest Lovers." Another said the 
 peasants were peasants of today labeled with 
 Greek names,, while still another said they be- 
 longed to the Middle Ages. This much, is 
 true: — the poet created his own country, even 
 as he did in "The Forest Lovers," although 
 the Derbyshire Peak and the Cheviot Hills 
 gave him some hint as to his locale. When 
 it comes to the time, there is doubt , al- 
 though terms like "reeve," "pinder," "mul- 
 ture," "theaves," and "hogget" point to a 
 provincial England of Chaucer's day. 
 
 The story of the little play is simple. 
 Neanias, a shepherd lad, after discoursing with 
 his grandfather, Geron, driven on by a rest- 
 less heritage in his blood, (the gift of his 
 mother about whom the glamour of mystery 
 is thrown, even as Ibsen throws it about El- 
 lida, "The Lady from the Sea"), goes to seek 
 the "sisters of the Tarn," the seven earth 
 spirits, of whom six have yielded to Pan, while 
 the seventh, Aglae, Virgin Dawn, has been 
 stricken cold and dumb by the angry god. 
 The six sisters, who have their powers of 
 speech, seek to beguile Neanias, but in vain. 
 He takes Aglae by the hand, wins her for 
 bride, and takes her home with him. In the 
 
 5i
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 next act, the poet shpws Aglae still dumb, 
 but broken to domestic ways, serving Neanias, 
 the while he is more in love with her than 
 ever. Pan sends a great storm, and Aglae, 
 drawn against her will, leaves the hut and 
 goes into th,e night, while the peasantry are 
 guarding their sheep. But she does not 
 leave before Merla — in love with Neanias — 
 has given her hard words. Neanias seeks his 
 lost wife, only to be jeered at by the six sis- 
 ter who proclaim th,e awful might of Pan, 
 who greatly angered strikes down both Ne- 
 anias and his loved one. Merla, quite con- 
 science-stricken, meets Pan, who is attracted 
 by the healthy beauty of the wench. Sh,e 
 pleads for Neanias and his Aglae and agrees 
 to give herself to Pan — but in marriage — a 
 piquant and daring touch. The play ends with 
 Aglae restored to speech and gladly listening 
 while h,er husband intones an Epiphany song. 
 This outline may convey an idea of the scope 
 of "Pan." There are three kinds of characters 
 in it, — the peasants, with their shrewd, hard- 
 won wisdom ; Neanias, the lover made bold by 
 his love; and the earth-spirits expressing 
 themselves in song. 
 
 The chief of these rustics is Geron, the 
 
 52
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 grandfather of Neanias. He is a real shep- 
 herd with, the smell and the colour of the soil 
 upon him; with his love of sheep, his wise 
 saws about the weather, his racy views about 
 life, his odd cronies. 
 
 His speech is authentic. His autobiogra- 
 phy in little rings true. It is the shepherd to 
 the life. 
 
 Now, in writing, a literary man who de- 
 sires to create clowns has two kinds of mod- 
 els before him. There are Shakespeare's won- 
 derful clowns, in a class all by themselves, 
 not mere rustic witlings, but sublimated fools, 
 if the term may be allowed. They are of no 
 time and place, but as universal as humanity, 
 as independent of time as the deathless plays 
 in which they laugh, and hum their quaint 
 old tunes. Then there is the clown peculiar 
 to one particular region, the rustic of Hardy's 
 beloved Wessex, for instance. Since Pas- 
 cency is anywhere and the time in which they 
 lived is "what you will," Mr. Hewlett had 
 to make his clowns representative of the class 
 rather than typical of any particular region. 
 He has chosen to learn from the unapproach- 
 able bard, rather than from the contemporary 
 novelist. Th,ere is a homely wit and wisdom 
 
 53
 
 MAURiqE HEWLETT 
 
 in these Pascency rustics which, with some 
 few changes, might be found in ignorant men 
 of the soil anywhere. Their simple old jokes, 
 their homely similes, their quaint old rhymes 
 have the rich savour of real life. Hear them at 
 their wit-combats, when they are slightly 
 tipsy : 
 
 Mopsus : 
 
 "Life goes to a tune according as a man is 
 tuneful, hath, music. Not otherwise by no 
 means. Sphorx, now, should be ripe wi' tunes 
 like an old organ. 
 
 Sphorx (leaning back) : 
 
 "My soul is as it were a windy bag; you 
 must jog me ere I sing. I should be squeezed." 
 
 Geron : 
 
 "I could a' squeezed ye ten year back." 
 
 Teucer: 
 
 "I can pinch ye, Sphorx, if it is only a mat- 
 ter of a nip here and there. Lords! What 
 a knotty thigh,. Sphorx, thou'rt a seasonable 
 vessel." 
 
 Sphorx : 
 
 "Alack, no vessel am I, ( but an humble in- 
 strument, friends, of the Lord's making, the 
 Lord's making. Well! I will sing ye a stave 
 of an old antient tune, perhaps ye know it. 
 
 54
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 'Tis all of a man and — " 
 
 Geron : 
 
 "And a woman, for a thousand pound!" 
 
 Sphorx : 
 
 "There is mention of a female, and of cider, 
 and of sheep, and of a man's wife or wives." 
 
 Neanias is different from these men. If 
 he has any of tus grandfather's blood in his 
 veins, he hardly shows it. The passionate, 
 poetic brain of the sea-woman, his mother, is 
 his also. Throughout, he is contrasted with 
 old Geron. The poetry of the one is set off 
 against the homely prose of the other; the 
 otherworldliness of the younger clash.es with 
 the homely wisdom of the seasoned "antient;" 
 the dreamer is pitted against the man of prac- 
 tical, if small, affairs. Neanias is a poet, filled 
 with the love of forests and of all nature, a 
 poet who is blind to material things, who goes 
 questing for th,e girl of his dream. 
 
 To come now to Mr. Hewlett's mythus. 
 He has created seven new goddesses, or rather 
 earth spirits. It is easy to understand the 
 legend in part. Pan is, of course, the great 
 fructifier, the great underlying and stimulat- 
 ing principle of nature, making fruitful these 
 daughters of earth. But consider Aglae and 
 
 55
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 seek to analyze farther and more explicitly 
 and the student becomes quite as befogged, 
 as did those who attempted to write out in 
 plain words what the symbolists of France 
 and Belgium meant. It is best to fall back on 
 Mr. Hewlett himself. He will give as distinct 
 a key as may be needed: 
 
 " 'Pan and the Young Shepherd' is difficult 
 to account for. I was steeped in poetry just 
 then and had been reading an enormous 
 amount of Platonism, Greek mythology and 
 pantheistic stuff. There's a deal of pantheism 
 tucked away in it and some good mythology. 
 The whole thing is really a myth. The root 
 idea. I suppose is the oneness of creation — man 
 as a natural force, differing in no essential way 
 from Plants and Animals. Then God is re- 
 duced to the same expression and He and 
 Man, and the Wind and Weather, Trees, 
 Sheep, Love, Life, Death, Fear, all play their 
 parts out and meet and merge and mate and 
 mingle. I believe it's more or less true, even 
 now. Personally, I think 'Pan' the nearest 
 I have ever come to poetry. It's the only sort 
 of poetry I can do." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett has created new characters in 
 mythology and has allowed them to describe 
 
 56
 
 PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHERD 
 
 themselves very graphically.. Sitys says: 
 "My laughing is lighter than the leap of a 
 squirrel, and brighter than the sun on the 
 yellow leaves. I love good cheer and warm 
 woods: I am very kind. I suckle the young 
 fauns that I bear to my lord the goat-shankt. 
 I am Bonny Beech Mast." Dryas says: "I am 
 Dryas, Crown & The Oak, youngest but one 
 of th,e seven Sisters. I am too wild to be fos- 
 ter-mother of fauns. I love all, but choose 
 none. Chiefest I love the Sun, and the Sun 
 me. If I have a master it is the Sun." 
 
 The songs by th,e sisters, might be defined 
 as Mr. Hewlett's plus something echoed from 
 Shelley, as when Adora sings : 
 
 "I am the Morning Calm and the smile of 
 me is like sleep 
 
 Even and deep; 
 
 And my eyes are twin-mountain lakes, and 
 the lashes of them 
 
 Like the swishing sedge 
 
 That hideth the water's edge. 
 
 I float on the white water ere daylight be- 
 gins 
 
 Or the moon grows wan, 
 
 And I spin at a loom the life of the day to 
 come, 
 
 57
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 A little span, 
 
 The day of the life of man." 
 
 The poet in Mr. Hewlett may have fallen 
 short of his aspirations, the artist may not 
 be entirely satisfied with his work — what true 
 artist ever is or can be ? — but it will be agreed 
 that "Pan" was well worth writing. It stands 
 out amid the ruck of easy verse by dint of the 
 riches with which it is filled. 
 
 58
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY. 
 
 MARCEL SCHWOB, trying to depict 
 the manners and feelings of an age 
 long dead, invented for himself, or 
 perhaps perfected is the discreeter phrase, a 
 method of doing so by painting miniatures, — 
 giving brief, vivid glimpses into the life of 
 by-gone days. 
 
 This is at its best in "Mimes," and "The 
 Children's Crusade," especially in the former. 
 A page or two suffices to set forth some 
 phase of the thought of some one personage 
 in the faraway ancient Greece of the classical 
 era. 
 
 Small in itself though it be, each miniature 
 is revelatory of the painter's great learning. 
 It shows how much he has read and dreamed 
 of Greece; how much he has comprehended 
 by intuition and by taking thought. 
 
 Similarly in his "Little Novels of Italy" Mr. 
 Hewlett has depicted the life of Renaissance 
 Italy after a method of his own. He has 
 
 59
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 painted five panel pictures^ brilliant with 
 colour, dazzling, struck off at a white heat, 
 glowing with the energy and poetry of youth. 
 Schwob's "Mimes" have always a greyness 
 about th,em as of faded antiques, toned by 
 time. And this is proper. Mr. Hewlett's 
 panels are brilliant with reds and greens and 
 golds. And this, too, is proper. 
 
 Always remembering that the subjects are 
 taken from Renaissance times, his panels 
 might have been labeled respectively, "Ve- 
 rona," "Padua/' "Nona," "Pistoja" and "Fer- 
 rara." Or, dropping for the moment his own 
 titles and attempting to condense in a phrase 
 the inner meaning of each,, they could have 
 been labeled: "A legend of Madonna; "Love 
 of the Precieuses ;" "Love of the condottieri ;" 
 "Love of a Renaissance poet;" and finally and 
 simply "Love's Comedy." 
 
 Almost all of Renaissance Italy is touched 
 upon in some of its phases in these five de- 
 lightful productions. If love is the main 
 theme, it is proper, "for love in loved-learned 
 Tuscany was then a roaring wind; it came 
 rhythmically and set the glowing mass beat- 
 ing like the sestet of a sonnet. One lived in 
 numbers in those days ; numbers always came. 
 
 60
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 You sonnetteered upon the battle-field, in 
 the pulpit, on the bench, at the bar." 
 
 And there are all sorts and conditions of 
 Renaissance men in love, — princes of degree, 
 captains of old wars, poets of fame, poetic 
 fops, seasoned condottieri, pages, secretaries 
 and shepherds. 
 
 Thinking of these things, one critic com- 
 pared th,e stories not to painting, but "to a 
 set of musical pieces in which the only marks 
 of expression are 'amoroso' and 'con dol- 
 cezza.' " 
 
 Literature as well as life has always in- 
 spired Mr. Hewlett. The reader naturally, 
 therefore, wonders what relation these little 
 novels bear to the old Italian novelle. 
 
 The latter were the instruments in which 
 the keynote of the Renaissance was struck. 
 Very probably then if Mr. Hewlett's tales re- 
 semble the novelle, they serve as the medium 
 in which he has conveyed the best of what he 
 knows and feels about Italy of the Renais- 
 sance. 
 
 The novelle, Symonds says, is a narrative, 
 but invariably brief and sketchy. "It does 
 not aim at presenting a detailed picture of 
 human life within certain artificially chosen 
 
 61
 
 MAURICfE HEWLETT 
 
 limitations, but confines itself to a striking 
 situation, or tells an anecdote illustrative of 
 some moral quality." 
 
 "The narrator went straight to h,is object, 
 which was to arrest attention, stimulate the 
 curiosity, gratify the sensual instincts, excite 
 the laughter, or stir the tender emotions of his 
 audience by some fantastic, extraordinary, 
 voluptuous, comic or pathetic incident. He 
 sketched his personages with a few swift 
 touches, set forth their circumstances with 
 pungent brevity, and expended his force upon 
 the painting of the central motive." 
 
 And Symonds adds that entertainment was 
 clearly their one great object. This quotation 
 makes clear how closely these "Little Novels" 
 approach, to the Renaissance novelle. They, 
 too, go straight to their one central theme; 
 th,ey, too, sketch their personages briefly and 
 vividly and they, too^ march rapidly forward 
 in narrative. They, too, are by turns fantastic, 
 extraordinary, voluptuous, comic, and pathetic. 
 There is even occasionally a tragic note. 
 
 Conforming thus very closely to the defini- 
 tion of an old style, they conform likewise to 
 a modern. It has been said that the modern 
 short story is either an anecdote or a picture. 
 
 62
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 In the hands of a master it may be both,. 
 Mr. Hewlett's "Little Novels" are both an- 
 ecdotes and pictures. Each presents a distinct 
 picture of a city of the Renaissance time. 
 Each conceivably could have started from 
 some anecdote or legend to be gathered from 
 the letters, histories and memoirs of the 
 period. Th.e criticism has been made that 
 these stories are purely objective; that the 
 author stimulates, but does not satisfy; that 
 he narrates, but does not prove; that he needs 
 to toil for a deeper vision of the human heart 
 and a greater power of convincement. 
 
 Remember that these are novelle and it 
 will be seen that such sayings are hypercriti- 
 cal. To demand what he does not pretend nor 
 wish to give, is as if one censured a comedian 
 for not being tragic. Mr. Hewlett had a 
 definite object in view, a definite plan that he 
 carried out. These stories present ob- 
 jectively a vision of Italy. They illuminate 
 and explain an era. They are not phychologi- 
 cal and do not pretend to be. Within the 
 limits set for them, they are among the best 
 examples of story-writing of the past three 
 or four decades. They do for Italy what 
 Stevenson's two famous short stories did for 
 
 63
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 medieval Paris. They fix his fame as a short 
 story writer. So unemotional and seasoned 
 a critic as Mr. Frederic Harrison has said: "I 
 h,old 'The Madonna of the Peach Tree' to be 
 as perfect a short story as we have had in our 
 time. It has humour, poetry, pathos, mystery, 
 imaginative history, and pure humanity." 
 
 There should be coupled with thjs story, 
 thus acclaimed, "The Judgment of Borso," so 
 various in its charm and fun, so dainty, so 
 daring a piece of typical Hewlett high comedy 
 when Mr. Hewlett is at his best. 
 
 Part of their charm is that these stories 
 break away from the somewhat traditional 
 Italy. George Brandes points out that the 
 Italy of literature is a country which never 
 existed on any map save of the roman- 
 ticists. The real Italy of bright colours and 
 cheerful life, he says, is not to be found in their 
 pages. To the romanticists Italy became what 
 Dulcinea was to Don Quixote, an ideal of 
 which they knew almost nothing beyond what 
 was conveyed by a few general and descrip- 
 tive phrases. They loved Italy as a ruin, 
 Catholicism as a mummy. This is not so with 
 Mr. Hewlett. He gives an Italy that is alive, 
 pulsating with the fierceness of life; pictures 
 
 64
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 a Catholicism very human and very close to 
 the hearts and lives of th,e common people. 
 His Italy does exist on the map. 
 
 Each of the five tales here grouped together 
 has a certain similarity beyond that of time 
 and place. Each deals with the problems that 
 confront a clean-hearted and simple-minded 
 girl set amid the whirl of a life that is fantas- 
 tic or frivolous, or evil. They are simple fools 
 made for loving; tall girls — Mr. Hewlett likes 
 them tall — with, "long sweet bodies," mostly 
 golden-haired and mostly with eyes grey or 
 green. Mr. Hewlett is a lover of women and 
 he loves them honest. In this he is a striking 
 contrast to Merimee„ for instance, most of 
 whose heroines are wicked either by nature 
 or choice. In Mr. Hewlett's books even his 
 rips have their redeeming qualities, are rather 
 the product of their environment and tragic 
 circumstances than innately evil, are pas- 
 sionately anxious to do th,e right. 
 
 So in these stories, no matter how dire the 
 peril, the woman triumphs, saving her honour 
 even though it be at the cost of life itself. 
 
 For the most part, the women of the "Little 
 Novels" are lowly in origin; as Mr. Hewlett 
 would phrase it, each is "a madonna of the re-
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 gion." There were no direct sources for these 
 tales. In each of the five cities the genius loci 
 spoke to the poet-heart of this novelist, and the 
 madonna of th,e place suggested her own type 
 of story. This madonna was the typical 
 woman to be found there even in these days 
 by the discerning visitor, — the honest, good 
 girl who "might have lived and died in her 
 alley — sweetheart of some half dozen decent 
 fellows^ wife of the most masterful, mother of 
 a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her qualities 
 of cheerful drudge and broodmare; beautiful 
 as a spring leaf till twenty, ripe as a peach on 
 the wall till thirty, keen-faced and wise, 
 mother and grandmother at forty ; and so on — 
 such she migfyt have lived and died and been 
 none the worse for her reclusion, had she 
 not — " and there the story begins. 
 
 Simple Giovanna Scarpa, happy wife, and 
 happy mother of a son, is accused of wrong- 
 doing with a handsome priest who is stoned 
 from the city. See now how the legend grows : 
 
 "A belated woman with a baby stumbles 
 upon a company of shepherds all in the twit- 
 tering dark. Hearts jump to mouths, flesh, 
 creeps, hairs stand tiptoe — Madonna, of course ! 
 Whom else could they call her, pray? They 
 
 66
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 don't know the woman; name her they must. 
 Well! Who is there they don't know whose 
 name comes readiest to the tongue? Madon- 
 na, of course. Good: Ecco Madonna!" 
 
 With this little scene as the climax, Mr. 
 Hewlett works both backward to the begin- 
 ning and forward to the end. It is 
 quite a pathetic little comedy with its life 
 story of Vanna, its tender picture of her 
 doting motherhood, its warm human apprecia- 
 tion of the Catholic worship of the Madonna, 
 and its skilled exposition of how the legend 
 and the wonder of it grew and grew until it 
 had become fixed in the traditions of a city. 
 And all this is garnished with swift pictures 
 of shepherd life, of tavern life, and of the 
 wild reckless life of Can Grande, lord of Ve- 
 rona. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett does not devote himself to the 
 legend exclusively. He composes the story 
 out of which conceivably the legend grew and 
 so makes it something more intimate, more 
 human and more understandable. 
 
 Ippolita, likewise lowly, becomes the hero- 
 ine of a comedy, played by poetic fantasts and 
 rough shepherd boys. Content to dwell in 
 her alley and be wooed for wife, she is seized 
 
 67
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 by Alessandro del Dardo and his fellow poets, 
 male and female, precieuses all. She is car- 
 ried off to be the heroine of th,eir silly song. 
 The maid, who knows more about the prose 
 of the kitchen than the poetry of courts, is 
 told of the lily of her candour, the rose of her 
 cheeks, the crocus of her hair, the pink anem- 
 ones which are her toes, th.e almond of her 
 fingers. She sits very afraid on her throne, 
 not comprehending all this foolishness, nor 
 understanding the worship wh,ich uses her as 
 a figure out of which to conjure tropes, rather 
 than as a warm sweet-lipped girl ripe for kiss- 
 ing. Is it any wonder that finally, disguised 
 in boy's clothes, she makes her escape to the 
 alluring h,iHs where the shepherd boys dwell? 
 Here she toils, here she is knocked down, even 
 as Isoult was when dwelling with the char- 
 coal burners in the forest. But this Ippolita 
 is not an Isoult of high lineage. No knight is 
 reserved for her. She marries the shepherd 
 who knocked her down, and is happy. 
 
 "The Duch,ess of Nona" illustrates another 
 phase of woman's love. Handsome English 
 Mary Lovell, daughter of a respectable whar- 
 finger of Bankside is carried off as wife of 
 Amilcare Passavente, who under the spell of 
 
 68
 
 LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY 
 
 her cool lips and her pretty clinging ways, be- 
 comes a poet, calling her his "Lady White- 
 throat" and other names as endearing and as 
 intimate. But the honeymoon is soon over 
 and Amilcare, adventurer and soldier of for- 
 tune, makes himself Duke of Nona mainly 
 through his handsome Duchess, who wins all 
 men's hearts and finally, as a possession for 
 which even a Borgia is willing to chaffer, 
 brings death to others and finds cruel death 
 herself, — though with her honour unscathed. 
 
 The tale of Messer Cino turns historical 
 dates topsy-turvy and treats the poet with dis- 
 respect. It is in its essence a farce comedy. 
 
 As for "The Judgment of Borso," analysis 
 is not easy. It is such a filmy, gauzy, dainty 
 little comedy, its fun is so contagious, its 
 spirit so audacious, its changes of scene so be- 
 wildering, that it defies compression in a para- 
 graph. It is a story of the romantic love of 
 two, hot-hearted young people and of how 
 their passion was snatched from tragic ending 
 by the cool judgment of Duke Borso. The 
 author's narrative is so swift, he enjoys its 
 telling so keenly himself, he relates its epi- 
 sodes with such dash, that improbabilities 
 are forgotten. The magic of the moment! 
 
 69
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 The reader gives himself up to that in each 
 of these wonderful stories in which Mr. Hew- 
 lett's art touched high water mark, — stories 
 which set h,im as a man apart, the most keen- 
 visioned n high-hearted, and poetically-equipped 
 of all exponents of Italian humanism. 
 
 70
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY. 
 
 IF you love the very words Middle Age; 
 if you conjure up in your mind glowing 
 old folios of black letter with gilt and 
 florid initials ; crimson and blue pages in which 
 slim ladies with spiked headdresses walk amid 
 sparse flowers and trees like bouquets, or 
 wh,ere men-at-arms attack walled cities no 
 bigger than themselves, or long-legged youths 
 with tight waists and frizzed hair kiss girls 
 under apple trees; or a king is on a dais with 
 gold lillies for his background, minstrels on 
 their knees before him, lovers in the gal- 
 lery: — If with all such dainty circumstances, 
 you can be pleased and not offended with the 
 shrewd surmise of savagery and heathenism 
 only too ready to go naked, then you will do 
 well" — not to go Pistoja as Mr. Hewlett 
 eloquently puts it, but to the historical ro- 
 mance entitled, "The Life and Death of Rich- 
 ard Yea and Nay." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett's Richard is to be preferred to 
 
 7 1
 
 MAURiqE HEWLETT 
 
 Scott's because it gives the truer picture of 
 Rich,ard, because its scope is more ample, its 
 canvass bigger, its figures more life-like, its 
 feeling for the 12th century more correct than 
 that of Sir (Walter in "The Talisman," in 
 which he is generally considered to have pre- 
 empted all claim to Richard. Scott may have 
 been as much a student of medieval times as 
 Mr. Hewlett; nay, more so, but whatever his 
 knowledge, he chose to suppress some of the 
 results of it. Scott's medieval world is 
 always a dream world, peopled by gal- 
 lant knights, women who are mere em- 
 bodiments of a knight's ideal, and some com- 
 mon people. Being residents in a dream 
 world, they naturally have dream manners. 
 The heathenism of real medieval men be- 
 neath their thin veneer of Christian civili- 
 zation, their innate love of blood, their 
 cruelty, their carelessness as to the suf- 
 ferings of the baseborn, even their indif- 
 ference to such things as cleanliness, — when 
 well known to Sir Walter — , are never ex- 
 pressed in his romances. None of the Scott 
 heroes would ever praise his lady's whiteness 
 by contrasting it with the blackness of his own 
 body, unwashed since he set forth in the wars. 
 
 72
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 And just as he is discreet to the point of sup- 
 pression in depicting the reverse side of the 
 shield, so is he likewise discreet in his treat- 
 ment of the relation between the sexes. Hence 
 there are practically no descriptions of erotic 
 situations at all. 
 
 This much must be said for truth's sake. 
 Scott's reputation, happily, does not depend 
 upon his Ivanhoes and his Talismans, but 
 upon immortal pictures of Scotch life, upon his 
 Jennie Deans and his Bailie Nicoll Jarvies. 
 However much Scott the innovator may have 
 delighted his own generation with, his ro- 
 mances of the Middle Ages, people now know 
 that the Middle Ages were not a stained glass 
 world, where knights were always good and 
 where ladies fair always waited to be wooed 
 and won. 
 
 Human passions ran just as high then as 
 now, nay higher; they were not shackled by 
 the thousand restraints put upon modern men. 
 Love and hate, lust for battle and lust for the 
 flesh, were big things in life, things exploited 
 with frank, even brutal candour. And there is 
 more of this in Mr. Hewlett than in Scott. 
 
 Again in writing historical romances, Mr. 
 Hewlett differs from his great predecessor in 
 
 73
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 other particulars. In Scott, the great historic 
 personages are made minor figures in the 
 novels; in Mr. Hewlett's book they are made 
 the main figures. Scott is more concerned with 
 the story of the adventures of some romantic 
 youth and maiden. Mr. Hewlett, while giving 
 romance, sh,ows himself a child of his age, by 
 attempting a phychological analysis of his 
 main personage. 
 
 Thackeray does not tamper with historic 
 fact in his "Esmond." He takes as perhaps 
 the main theme a perplexing point, such as 
 the problem as to why Queen Anne failed to 
 try to pass the inheritance of the crown to her 
 Stuart nephew. Considering each known 
 fact, he adds to it others and makes explana- 
 tion of the problem. He extends known facts 
 and so does not jar one's sense of the probabili- 
 ties. Mr. Hewlett wants to tell Richard's 
 story; to elucidate the seeming contradictions 
 in his character and career; to explain him 
 as no formal biography has done. To this 
 end, h,e adapts part of the method of Thack- 
 eray. Given certain perplexing problems in 
 Richard's career and given certain known 
 facts, he extends them by inventions of his 
 own. But he is not always consistent. He 
 
 74
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 suppresses where it is necessary to aid his in- 
 vention. 
 
 However, in the main, he is guided by his- 
 tory or by the old chroniclers, even to the 
 point of following William of Newburgh and 
 Roger of Wendover in their account of how 
 the Old Man of Musse sent letters to Euro- 
 pean monarchs vindicating Richard's name 
 from any stain in the matter of the Marquis 
 Montferrat's death. With certain historical 
 facts upon which to build and with certain 
 inventions of his own to trick out the romance, 
 the question is what is Hewlett's attitude to 
 be? He answers it in part himself: 
 
 "Differing from the Mantuan as much in 
 sort as degree, I sing less arms than the man, 
 less the panoply of some Christian king of- 
 fended than the heart of one in its urgent, 
 private transports; less treaties than the 
 agony of treating, less personages than per- 
 sons, the actors rather than the scene. Arms 
 pass like the fashion of them, today or to- 
 morrow they will be gone; but men live, 
 their secret springs what they have always 
 been." 
 
 In other words, he writes a biographical- 
 historical-phychological romance. History 
 
 75
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 records that Rich,ard was "a bad son, a bad 
 husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man." 
 If this were all of him, there would be nothing 
 to write but a book of nays. However, there 
 must have been more, historians to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding. 
 
 No man, entirely compounded of bad quali- 
 ties, could have captivated the fancy of the 
 people of his own time and survived as a 
 heroic legend for centuries thereafter. It is 
 Mr. Hewlett's business, therefore, to set 
 forth the yeas. 
 
 This is done by citation of historic occur- 
 rences and by narration of imagined ones, 
 by testimony of Bertran de Born and by ex- 
 tracts from the supposititious chronicle of the 
 Abbot Milo. Richard is viewed from various 
 stand points and always there is impressed the 
 dual nature of the man, — the evil warring with 
 the good. "He is ever of two minds," says De 
 Born, "hot head and cold heart, flaming heart 
 and chilled head. He will be for God and the 
 enemy of God; will expect heaven and tamper 
 with, hell. With rage he will go up, laughing 
 come down. Ho! He will be for you and 
 against you; eager, slow; a wooer, a scorner; 
 a singer of madrigals, ah, and a croaker after- 
 
 76
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 wards. There is no stability in him, neither 
 length of love nor hate,, no bottom, little 
 faith." 
 
 This might be said to be the key to Richard 
 as Mr. Hewlett sees him. He makes only one 
 exception, in only one thing is Richard stable, 
 — his love for Jehane of whom he says, "I 
 will marry the French girl and love my golden 
 Jehane until I die." 
 
 Love for the golden Jehane and love for 
 the Cross — of these two inspirations Mr. 
 Hewlett makes his story. The tragedy of 
 Richard's life comes from the conflict of the 
 two passions. If Richard desires to enter 
 upon the crusade, he must needs have money; 
 if he wants money, he must needs make al- 
 liance with some wealthy sovereign; if he 
 makes such an alliance, he must needs do so 
 by wedding the daughter of the gold-bestow- 
 er. 
 
 Thus Richard is placed at the crossroads of 
 his career. He must forego Jehane or the cru- 
 sade. In his passionate way, he declares he 
 will do neither. It is then that Jehane, worked 
 upon by the Queen Mother, prevails upon 
 him to give her up. 
 
 And, of course, it is largely out of this act 
 
 77
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of self-abnegation on the one hand and dis- 
 appointment on the other, that the subsequent 
 chain of tragic events grows. Indeed, it is just 
 here that the touch of artificiality comes in. 
 In the "Book of Yea" everything goes well 
 for Richard ; he woos and wins the fair Jehane ; 
 he wins in the quarrels with his father; he 
 succeeds to the throne of ; England and is 
 crowned both there and in his French lands. 
 The book ends with his agreement to wed 
 Berengere. 
 
 In the "Book of Nay," everything goes 
 wrong with Richard. His sacrifice of Jehane 
 turns to dead sea fruit, and he puts his little 
 Queen away. His crusade to the Holy Land 
 is rendered abortive by the quarrels of his 
 allies and associates, largely brought on by 
 his own hasty temper and passionate pride. 
 He does brave deeds in vain. He is finally 
 forced to leave the land, to taste the bitterness 
 of captivity ; to fight for every inch of his way 
 to his own domains; and finally to have as 
 ashes in the mouth the knowledge that his 
 life was probably purchased by Jehane's 
 supreme sacrifice of herself. 
 
 Richard is presented as drawn by the chron- 
 iclers of his time. Holding forth on his 
 
 78
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 chosen way, he accepts from all and gives 
 little. Men die for him, women break their 
 hearts for him and finally — in this story — he 
 dies, a man disappointed, a man balked in his 
 greatest desires. Mr. Hewlett has managed 
 to convey not only a vivid realization of his 
 qualities as soldier and leader, not only a 
 glimpse of his tempests of passion, but of the 
 fundamentally religious nature of the man 
 when touched and of the riotous poet heart of 
 him, that French poet who exclaims in agony 
 when he realizes the need of forgetting the 
 woman he has given up: "Oh, Gaston, let 
 us get to the South, see the sun fleck the roads, 
 smell the oranges!" 
 
 The fair Jehane St Pol, whom the author 
 says Richard loved from first to last, is his 
 typical heroine. She is beautiful, as a matter 
 of course. And even as her beauty corres- 
 ponds to the Hewlett ideal, so her actions 
 are of a piece with, the Hewlett model. She 
 is a woman all meek and lowly in her lover's 
 hands, ready to make any sacrifice for him. 
 She gives him herself without the sanctities 
 of the marriage bond. When he would wed 
 her and crown h,er Queen, she puts aside her 
 honour for his good. When his life is in danger, 
 
 79
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 she sells herself to buy his safety. And this is 
 one of the big blemishes in the book. It is not 
 in accord with, art and it is not in accord with 
 life. That this girl, so passionate and yet in 
 essence so pure, could sell h,erself, could be- 
 come the plaything of the disgusting Old 
 Man of Musse with his harem of concubines, 
 could conceive an affection for th,e Oriental 
 and bear him three sons, — this is too great a 
 strain on credulity, too shocking to one's con- 
 ception of what Jehane was like, too cheapen- 
 ing of her in every way. It is nauseous and 
 not even the pleading of a friendly critic like 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison can convince to the 
 contrary; not even the citation that th,is was 
 the wild 1 2th century of Heloisa, of Con- 
 stance, and of the period when Richard was 
 reported to have offered his sister in marriage 
 to the brother of Saladin. 
 
 Perhaps the best character drawing in the 
 book is that of the Abbot Milo, a Carthusian 
 monk, abbot of the cloister of Saint Mary-of- 
 the-Pine in Poictiers, lifelong friend of the 
 king, and his almoner and chronicler. 
 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison says there was such 
 a personage and that h,e wrote a book about 
 Richard which has been lost. Mr. Hewlett 
 
 80
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 has breathed the breath of life into Milo and 
 re-written his lost book. The Abbot stands be- 
 fore the reader a "red-faced, watery-eyed old 
 man, rheumy and weathered well." He is 
 learned in all the lore of his age; he is fond of 
 rhetoric, of high phrases, and of long dis- 
 sertations. He is angry at interruptions. He 
 likes to read even kings and princes a lesson. 
 
 It is from the writings of this priest that 
 Mr. Hewlett pretends to draw justification 
 for his inventions. The extracts from Milo's 
 supposititious history lend just the air of 
 verity to the novel that it needed to help over- 
 come scruples when confronted by certain 
 aspects of the story. Mr Hewlett either tells 
 a thing and then corroborates it from Milo's 
 book, or else gives the extract from Milo 
 alone. 
 
 Now as to th,e English of the novel. In the 
 main, there are two ways of telling a histori- 
 cal tale. If one follows Scott, he gives the 
 narrative partly in the English of today, but 
 the dialogue in what is supposed to be the 
 language of the period chosen. If one follows 
 the Thackeray of "Esmond," one chooses the 
 harder course. In "Esmond," Thackeray re- 
 produced the English of Anne's day not only 
 
 81
 
 MAURIOE HEWLETT 
 
 in the dialogue, but also in the narrative 
 proper. Mr Hewlett has used something of 
 the method of both,- His dialogue attempts 
 to reproduce the spirit of the times. 
 
 There is none of the glorified bombast, for 
 instance,, of Scott's King. Mr Hewlett's 
 Richard talks more like a human being of the 
 1 2th century. His language is that of the 
 fighting Troubadour King, a language of po- 
 etic fancies, queer oaths, elliptical expressions 
 such as men used in real life. The rolls and 
 chronicles of Richard's time, to which Bishop 
 Stubbs wrote such, fascinatingly learned pre- 
 faces, have been studied by Mr. Hewlett with 
 the greatest of care. From them he gathered 
 something of the atmosphere of the times; 
 something of the language that was then used ; 
 something of the manner of speaking. But 
 he has not slavishly followed them. From 
 the poets, from the dramatists of Elizabeth's 
 day, from northern and provincial dialects, he 
 has gathered good out-of-the-way words and 
 has allowed them to filter through and colour 
 his narrative with, a quaint medieval tinge 
 that makes it the proper setting for the dia- 
 logue. The narrative is thus modern, but 
 with a suggestion of the antique. 
 
 82
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 One more point remains to be made. Per- 
 haps the truest definition of Mr. Hewlett's 
 "Richard" would be to call it a chronicle novel, 
 even as ten out of 37 of Shakespeare's dramas 
 are chronicle plays, in the strictest sense of 
 the word. The play of this order applies to 
 lay history the methods of dramatic narration. 
 The chronicle novel such as Mr. Hewlett gives, 
 applies to lay history the methods of nov- 
 elistic narration. The chronicle play recounts 
 what happened in the reign of a particular king, 
 what incidents led to his accession, what epi- 
 sodes marked h,is fall or death. It is very 
 much the same with the chronicle novel. The 
 play tended to develop into one of three forms, 
 — the comedy of manners, the romantic play, 
 or the tragedy. "Richard," has nothing of the 
 comedy of manners, but it does have the ro- 
 mance, and it closes upon a note of tragedy. 
 In fact, in a sense, the whole book is a tragedy, 
 the tragedy of the failure of a great lover and 
 of a great crusader and king, of a man de- 
 feated by the cross currents of life and fate 
 and passion. 
 
 Even in the best of the chronicle plays, it 
 is not the plot which tells, but the episodes, 
 
 83
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 and such unity as th,ey have comes from such 
 figures as Hotspur, Richard III., and Henry V. 
 moving through the various scenes and being 
 affected by them. 
 
 In the chronicle novel, as in th,e play, many 
 things happen, but the actions are mainly in 
 sequence, because historically they did happen 
 in just th,at order. They do not grow clearly 
 out of preceding causes, such as are necessary 
 in the novel conforming to the canons of the 
 art. To overcome such defects, the chronicle 
 novelist is put to the straits of inventing 
 motives and causes in explanation of known 
 historical happenings. Thus the prophecy of 
 a leper impels Jehane to refuse to become 
 •Richard's Queen; Montferrat's death is pur- 
 chased by Jehane selling herself, etc., etc. 
 
 The tendency is ultimately for a chronicle 
 play to become what has been aptly termed 
 "Sublimated melodrama." Th,e melodramatic 
 
 also often pervades the chronicle novel. 
 
 With these considerations, is "Richard" a 
 success? 
 
 Mr, Hewlett's art of narrative was never 
 truer. His battle pieces hold th,e interest to 
 full measure. His death bed scene in Rich- 
 
 84
 
 RICHARD YEA AND NAY 
 
 ard's tent moves to tears. His pictures of 
 faraway places glow with the fervour of their 
 faraway sun. His style follows suit. It is a 
 "galliard" style, full, rich, high, and fantastic 
 as suits the subject, but grave and simple 
 when the situation demands. The novel 
 abounds in tense dramatic situations. Its 
 etchings of the great men of the past are su- 
 perb, the three women, Alois, Berengere and 
 Jehane are admirably contrasted throughout; 
 their characters are revealed not only by their 
 words, but by their actions. 
 
 But the book is not a success. 
 
 It lacks unity; it lacks a great central plot; 
 the very division into the "Book of Yea" and 
 the "Book of Nay" indicates this. A chronicle 
 novel dealing with Richard should have him 
 always as the main figure on the stage. But 
 this is not the case here. Occasionally he is 
 lost sight of while lesser persons claim the 
 reader's attention. 
 
 There is still another fault. The book lacks 
 verisimilitude. There are jarring passages. 
 There is an unhealthy dwelling upon the pas- 
 sion of Berengere, bride but not wife. There 
 is too great a strain upon credulity in the sac- 
 
 85
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 rifice of Jehane to the Old Man of Musse. 
 This seems melodramatic, "stagey" and 
 forced, rather than true to romance and to 
 life. In short the book is a failure, magnificent 
 but none the less a failure. 
 
 86
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES. 
 
 IT sometimes almost seems as if the books in 
 Mr. Hewlett's library tease him into trying 
 his skill in treating subjects already used 
 by acknowledged masters of literature. Scott's 
 "Talisman" did not debar him from taking 
 Richard as a hero. The myriad books about 
 Mary, did not affright him from his purpose of 
 setting forth the tragedy of the Scottish 
 Queen. In 1901 he flung down another rather 
 daring challenge to the critical by his "New 
 Canterbury Tales," a title and subject sure to 
 arouse the wrath of some of the professed 
 Chaucerians and also of thpse who praise 
 Chaucer without having read him. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett was not unaware of the criti- 
 cism that would be heaped upon his head for 
 his audacity. He was ready with his apologia. 
 In fact, it is contained in th,e very first 
 words of his prologue : 
 
 "Pray do not suppose that Chaucer's were 
 the only pilgrims to woo the Canterbury way 
 with stories, nor that theirs was the only road 
 
 87
 
 MAURIQE HEWLETT 
 
 by wh,ich to seek the Head of Thomas. His 
 people may have set the fashion and himself 
 a tantalizing standard of attainment; but that 
 is a poor-hearted chronicler who withholds 
 a tale because some other has told one well." 
 
 Omitting the unfortunate — and forced — 
 comparison with greatness crowned by Time's 
 verdict, the only fair test that should be made 
 is the one in answer to the question: What 
 of this work absolutely, without reference to 
 anything that has been written on similar 
 th,emes before? 
 
 And the best answer to the question seems 
 to be the remark the London Athenaeum was 
 moved to make when the book appeared, viz 
 that "Mr. Hewlett, now that Stevenson is 
 dead, is certainly the prince of literary story- 
 tellers." 
 
 The book is a real contribution to literature 
 and at least two of the stories are among the 
 best things that Mr. Hewlett has done. 
 
 Having adopted a Chaucerian title, he also 
 adopted the Chaucerian scheme. Each tale 
 is such as the specific character, to whom it is 
 credited, might have told, although the author 
 says: "I ask you to be more concerned with 
 the tales than the teller." 
 
 88
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 Chaucer's pilgrims started from the Tabard 
 Inn, Southwark, and it is not clear whether 
 the journey was to be made in one, two, or 
 four days. They set forth on April 28, 1388. 
 Sixty-two years later, on May-day 1450, Hew- 
 lett's pilgrims set forth from Winchester. 
 There is no doubt as to the stages of their 
 journey. They are carefully set down. 
 
 One of the superb gems of Chaucer's poem 
 is of course the masterly prologue upon which 
 so many commentators have expended their 
 eloquence. Mr. Hewlett very wisely avoids 
 th,e mistake of trying to do for his prose book 
 what Chaucer did for his master work. There 
 is a prologue, it is true, rather quaintly set 
 forth in language that conveys a tone of the 
 archaic, but it is swift and to the point. 
 
 The reader is made acquainted with the 
 Prioress of Ambresbury in Wilts, born Tou- 
 chett of Merton, a stately dame but with a 
 tender spot for minstrels, young women, and 
 boys. He meets Dan Costard, her confessor, 
 so charmingly described as a "loose-skinned 
 old man with mild blue eyes, coloured (as 
 it seemed) by that Heaven which he daily 
 sought." Then there are Mistress Mawdleyn, 
 niece of the Prioress; Percival Perceforest, 
 
 89
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 page to Mawdleyn's father and lover of Mawd- 
 leyn; Captain Salamon Brazenhead, swash 
 buckler, of whom more in a later chapter, and 
 various commoners mentioned as a "Scrivener 
 of London," Master Richard Smith, Mariner 
 from Kingston-upon-Hull, and the latter's 
 wife. 
 
 So much for the prologue and the charac- 
 ters, Now as to the tales they tell. Chaucer 
 was a child of the Middle Ages. He was med- 
 ieval in his style and in the turn of his 
 phrases. He freely resorted to a mixture of 
 the names and associations of his own times 
 with those of the pre-Christian era. His 
 morality was often the overstrained morality 
 of the Middle Ages, as demonstrated in the 
 famous tale of the patient Griselda. He was 
 not above the superstitions of his time, as is 
 shown in his Prioress' tale, one of those cruel 
 calumnies against the Jews so current then 
 and still so current even today in darkest Rus- 
 sia and Roumania. His naivete is perhaps 
 not literary style so much as the tone due 
 to the period in which he wrote. It was per- 
 haps the tone of all writing men then, height- 
 ened in him by something peculiarly lovable 
 and childlike. Mr. Hewlett has imitated these 
 
 90
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 things only in part. His tales are such as the 
 Middle Ages rejoiced in. They avoid, for 
 the most part, modern thought, colour and 
 feeling, without attempting a distinctly archa- 
 ic style. In fact, their style rather suggests 
 than reproduces the manner of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 If Chaucer holds up Griselda and Constance 
 as the pattern of model women, Mr. Hewlett 
 gives their sister in Alys. If Chaucer gives 
 superstition in the story of the little child 
 whose throat was cut by the wicked Jews be- 
 cause he sang so sweetly "O alma redemp- 
 toris mater," Mr. Hewlett, too, reproduces 
 th,e feeling of that old time by his story of 
 that other sweet singer, Gervase of Plessy. 
 
 After all, however, Mr. Hewlett writes in 
 the present ei*a. The tales he spins are 
 too subtle to have come down from Chaucer's 
 time. Their stroke is too swift; their manage- 
 ment too scientific. They have a humour which 
 ventures often very close to grossness, but 
 always held in check by a proper regard for 
 finer taste and by deep reverence for the 
 Catholic mysteries. The art of their plot con- 
 struction is too greatly dexterous and too fine- 
 ly poised to be anything other than that of a 
 
 9i
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 writer who lives in an era that is heir to all the 
 ages that have gone before. 
 
 Of the six tales given by Mr. Hewlett, one 
 only has a definite source and that is Frois- 
 sart, combined with a legend of the founda- 
 tion of the Order of the Garter. The others 
 are Mr. Hewlett's own. They are perhaps to 
 be paralleled in the legends of the saints, in 
 Italian novelle, and in ancient chronicles of 
 medieval wars. They are the result of the 
 author's wide reading of medieval literature. 
 It is th,e learned scrivener who gives the tale 
 of the Countess Alys; it is the man of re- 
 ligious fervour, Dan Costard, who tells the 
 tale of the trials of the hermit Vigilas; it is 
 the bombastic swashbuckler, Brazenhead, who 
 relates a story of medieval Italy. Two of the 
 stories, "Th,e Half Brothers" and "Eugenio 
 and Galeotto" are "Little Novels of Italy." 
 "The Cast of the Apple" is such a tale as Wil- 
 liam Morris might have told. 
 
 The story of "Gervase of Plessy" is some- 
 thing like those one may read in the compila- 
 tions of legends concerning the saints. With 
 Chaucer's Prioress' story, it is a companion 
 piece to the legends of Saint Hugh of Lincoln 
 and Saint William of Norwich. There is a 
 
 92
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 jarring note in the story, however, that spoils 
 all the effect of its studied simplicity. The 
 blemish is the tone of eroticism in the semi- 
 sane mothering mood of Sornia towards Ger- 
 vase. One of the two notable stories of the 
 book is the Scrivener's tale of the Countess 
 Alys. "I propose a tale," says the Scrivener, 
 "All in the manner of that noble clerk and 
 fellow of my mystery Master Geoffrey 
 Chaucer." 
 
 And again, "Although rhyme shall be lack- 
 ing (for I am no rhymester for choice) I prom- 
 ise you the other elements of art, as balance, 
 careful heed to longs and shorts, proportion, 
 exquisite choice." 
 
 What the Scrivener says of his story, can 
 truly be said of Mr. Hewlett's work. There 
 is indeed balance, careful heed to proportion, 
 an exquisite choice,, — for this is a pearl of a 
 story, perfect in its tone, medieval in spirit and 
 denouement. Froissart tells something of this 
 Alys, Countess of Salisbury; of how she de- 
 fended her husband's castle of Wark while the 
 master was a prisoner in France; of how King 
 Edward, coming to lift the siege, remained to 
 beleaguer the heart of the lady ; of how she 
 resisted him; and of how, later in his career, 
 
 93
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 he had her as his guest of honor at a great 
 tournament. Legend tells that the Order of 
 the Garter was founded in her honor when 
 base-minded men sniggered as the king picked 
 up the lady's dropped garter. So much for 
 origins. Mr. Hewlett has given the story 
 a setting of his own. He has filled it with 
 medieval colour and spirit; he has drawn a 
 noble portrait of Alys, greatly tried, greatly 
 enduring, "who had a wild look, with some 
 audacity and much, innocent hardihood; as 
 though like Taillefer at Senlac, she played 
 with her virtue, tossing it up, but always 
 catching it again." 
 
 With true artistic instinct, Mr. Hewlett has 
 elaborated the old chronicles and the old 
 legend into a tale of dramatic interest. There 
 is the double theme of the lust of the King 
 for the fair virtuous Alys, and of the humble, 
 self-denying love of her by the poor scholar, 
 Lancelot, tutor of her children. Lancelot, is 
 an invention by Mr. Hewlett, as is also the 
 death of the Earl of Salisbury and the plotting 
 of Pandarus the First, Alys' base brother, and 
 Pandarus the Second, Alys' stepson. 
 
 Throughout, without any undue emphasis 
 upon the point, the tale is a noble vindication 
 
 94
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 of the steadfastness of the good wife, who em- 
 bodies in herself all the medieval ideals of 
 what sh,e should be, — sweet, loving, virtuous, 
 long-suffering, careful of her husband's hon- 
 our, good name, castles, fiefs, and goods. 
 
 The most powerful story in the book, how- 
 ever, is an entirely new departure for Mr. 
 Hewlett. "Peridore and Paravail" is an ex- 
 cursion into the horrible and terrifying. 
 It is an examination of a mind diseased. It 
 irresistibly calls up for comparison Flaubert's 
 "La Tentation de Sainte Antoine" and is not 
 unworthy the hand of that master in the study 
 of the horrible and the bizarre. However, it 
 is more compact, it is more easily understood 
 by the many than Flauberts' work, and it is 
 relieved by a love story of great sweetness 
 and purity. It is filled from end to end with 
 the shadow of the superstitions of the Middle 
 Ages. "Old Legion" is a very terrifying fig- 
 ure. Witch.es perch on eaves of houses and 
 gibber of their diabolical plots. All of the 
 forces of evil strive to outwit mortal inten- 
 ions and win souls from God. The blessed 
 Vigilas was a hermit of Cauntrip, who dwelt 
 in a hut by Bleme Barrow under the shadow 
 of the Druse ring. He saw visions and did 
 
 95
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 marvels daily by reason of his fastings, his 
 prayers, and his flagellations of the too re- 
 bellious flesh. He was forty and had led a 
 saintly life for thirty years, when he found 
 the babe whom h,e named Paravail and who 
 grew up a slip of a girl whose hair was the 
 colour of dormice and with feet lighter than 
 a hare's. This Paravail was withput a soul, 
 for she was weaned after one month with a 
 foster-mother whom Vigilas found for her. 
 And so she grew up to be at once his torment 
 and h,is delight. She was a wild thing such 
 as Mr. Hewlett loves to depict, — one of those 
 denizens of the forest who run with the hares, 
 hide with the foxes, swim like the otter, are 
 sib with, all soulless creatures, alien only from 
 men and women. And then the beginning of 
 Vigilas' madness comes upon him. One 
 moment the flesh that has been subdued for 
 so long rebels, and he loves the girl's beauty. 
 The next, h,e sees in her a device of the evil 
 one to lure him to deepest Hell. 
 
 Into her little world there comes Peridore, 
 the shepherd boy, her one month fosterling. 
 Tfyey love, wildly, yet innocently, even as 
 Aglae and Neanias. Indeed, there is quite 
 a parallel in the relations between the two 
 pairs of lovers. 
 
 96
 
 NEW CANTERBURY TALES 
 
 It was Neanias who warmed Aglae's cold, 
 who taught her human speech, wh,o revealed 
 to her that she had a soul, who rescued her 
 from the terrifying attendants of Pan. So, 
 in this tale, it is Peridore who rescues Para- 
 vail, not only from the fanatic tyranny of 
 Vigilas, not only from the eerie scheming of 
 the witches, but who takes her to the Holy 
 Mount where there are those who find a soul 
 for her, so that she will be a fitting mate for 
 the sturdy shepherd lad who has loved her 
 well. 
 
 With Peridore's advent, the madness of 
 Vigilas reaches its climax. His soul becomes 
 a battle-ground for angels and fiends. The 
 angels tell lym to let Paravail go, as youth is 
 calling to youth. The fiends tell him to keep 
 her for his own. He resolves to take her home. 
 He will "look and long, but curse her; and 
 love, but chastise; and fear, but dare her do 
 me harm." And so this madman takes the 
 girl into the hut where he keeps her prisoner. 
 
 It is at the height of his madness, when 
 fright and starvation have rendered Paravail 
 as one who is dead, that Peridore knocks 
 Vigilas down and bears off the girl, away from 
 the hermit and the wrangling witches whom 
 
 97
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 he hears in the woods, away to the Holy 
 Mount. When Paravail has a soul, she sets 
 forth with Peridore. 
 
 The story is one which, in its terrifying im- 
 agination and superstition, is medieval to the 
 core. But there is something deeper than 
 that in it. This story of a loveless hermit- 
 saint, undone by his savage asceticism portrays 
 a moving mental tragedy. Step by step there 
 is shown the breakdown of a brain. Disease 
 gradually destroys sanity until nothing but 
 religious madness is left. It is horrible, but 
 only as is the actual tragedy of diseased 
 minds. There is a compelling sincerity in 
 the picture that fills with pity. It hurts be- 
 cause of its very truth. It throws a flashlight 
 into the darker corners of the human brain 
 and shows the dangers that lurk when the deli- 
 cate fibres begin to weaken. For the first 
 time one begins to understand those mad 
 eremites of the dark ages, their fanaticism, 
 their flagellation of the bleeding flesh, their 
 acts of dark savagery, seemingly unrelieved 
 by any semblance of human feeling. 
 
 98
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR. 
 
 A BOOK about Queen Mary— if it be 
 honest — has no business to be a gen- 
 teel exercise in the romantic; if the 
 truth is to be told, let it be h,ere. * * * A 
 hundred books have been written, a hundred 
 songs sung; men enough of these latter days 
 have broken their hearts for Queen Mary's. 
 What is more to the matter is that no heart 
 but hers was broken in time. All the world 
 can love her now; but who loved her then? 
 Not a man among them. A few girls went 
 weeping; a few boys laid down their necks 
 that sh,e might walk free of the mire. Alas! 
 the mire swallowed them up, and she must 
 soil her pretty feet. This is the nut of the 
 tragedy; pity is involved rather than terror. 
 But no song ever pierced the fold of her 
 secret, no book ever found out the truth, be- 
 cause none ever sought her heart. Here, then, 
 is a book which has sought nothing else, and 
 a song which springs from that only; called 
 
 99
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 on th,at same account, 'The Queen's Quair.' " 
 This, from the author's prologue, will 
 serve to show that Mr. Hewlett was fully 
 aware of the difficulties in his path; of the 
 cry that would go up that he was treading 
 in well-trodden path,s, which had been pur- 
 sued before him by men of no less rank in 
 their respective countries than Scott and 
 Schiller and Alfieri and Swinburne. It was a 
 bold undertaking, — this one of making a story 
 of the six most debated years in the reign 
 of the most debated woman in history. 
 
 It was prefaced by words equally as bold. At 
 one sweep, Mr. Hewlett waved away all those 
 others wh,o had attempted to make Mary live 
 again,, saying that they had missed the key 
 to her mystery by failing to seek the feelings 
 of her wild, passionate heart. 
 
 Following such an undertaking and such a 
 preface, a veritable challenge to the critical, 
 nothing could succeed and satisfy but the 
 highest form of success. The venture was 
 justified by the production of the most high- 
 hearted, full-blooded, living book about Mary 
 that h,as yet been written, a veritable and 
 authentic masterpiece, presenting the author's 
 splendid art at its highest and best phase and 
 
 ioo
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 putting before the reader an unforgettable 
 picture of Mary and the crafty, scheming men 
 by whom sh,e was surrounded, deceived, and 
 destroyed. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett, aside from his needful prepara- 
 tion for historical romance, has always had 
 a bias towards history. So the work of delv- 
 ing into the books of this great epoch in 
 Scotland's past must have been peculiarly con- 
 genial. Having read much, it then became 
 necessary for him to forget much. It was 
 necessary to retain only the great essential 
 facts in Mary's story, and afterwards to pick 
 out such details as were needful for the de- 
 velopment of a moving, life-history. But 
 something even more than this was necessary. 
 It has been pointed out recently in the reviews 
 of Hardy's criticism-compelling "Dynasts" 
 th,at the author displayed a veritable cosmic 
 vision, beholding all Europe spread out before 
 him as on a map, with its armies and its 
 battles seen as if they were the struggles of 
 mites. Mr. Hewlett has displayed something 
 of this cosmic vision — though on a lesser 
 scale — in dealing with the Scotland of Mary's 
 time. He, too, displays something of the 
 larger irony, the greater satiric comprehen- 
 
 ioi
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 sion of the futility and the pity of it all. He 
 sees these puppets caught up and netted by 
 their fate ; he sees th,em vainly beating against 
 the bars and dashed to destruction; he pities 
 and he compassionates, but at the same time 
 he is as clear and as merciless as bare truth 
 itself. 
 
 In his vision all th,e multiform events of 
 this tumultuous, stirring, seething six years' 
 period fall naturally into dramatic form, and 
 with an art that conceals th,e effort and the 
 intense study it must have involved. He has 
 pictured the grey and dour Scotland which 
 seemed to Mary, and rightly so, such a hos- 
 tile land after her days in sunny France; he 
 h,as drawn this slip of a girl as the pivot 
 about whom were maneuvered the numerous 
 intrigues of the time. To the half savage 
 nobles she was the means by which th,ey 
 might secure lands and grab office; to the 
 fierce, hot-gospellers she was an idolatress 
 who followed th.e mandates of the Pope of 
 Rome and, hence, a woman who ought to be 
 sent to death and who, in the meantime, 
 should be assailed from every pulpit and 
 thwarted in every desire; to France, Spain, 
 and Austria, whither she looked in vain for en- 
 
 102
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 couragement and support — one Catholic mon- 
 arch appealing to the monarchs of the great 
 Catholic lands — she was a mere piece in the 
 great game of diplomatic chess they were play- 
 ing for wealth and power; to the Pope she was 
 an instrument that he might use in redeeming 
 Scotland from the wave of Protestant loyalty 
 that had swept over it under the compelling 
 eloquence and power of John Knox; to the 
 English Catholics sh,e was the rose of their 
 hope and, byt that same token, rendered the 
 object of Elizabeth's bitterest thoughts and 
 of her crudest vengeance; while to Moray, 
 who looked through his fingers at every crime 
 committed in his interests, she was the one 
 person who served as a bar to the sinister 
 ambitions of a bastard who coveted a throne. 
 Mr. Hewlett in telling this story has ex- 
 tenuated nothing, nor set down aught in 
 malice. It is small wonder, however, that he 
 has been moved to pity. Everyone, not a 
 savage bigot, is drawn to a lass who finds 
 herself with no trusty friends in a land where 
 the priests of her religion are pelted with, eggs, 
 whose chaplains are bullied and stoned in the 
 streets, whose rites are ridiculed. Mr. Hew- 
 lett's pity leads him to maintain that with 
 
 103
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 different surroundings and under different cir- 
 cumstances, the girl might h,ave been devel- 
 oped into a better woman and Queen. He 
 does not make the mistake of partisanship. 
 He seeks to show Mary's character in the 
 light of truth. His is not the Mary of Al- 
 fieri,, nor of Sch,iHer, nor Scott, nor Swinburne. 
 To Alfieri, an Italian and a Catholic, Mary 
 makes her appeal as a Catholic martyr and 
 Queen. His Mary is typical of the productions 
 of dramatists and novelists in Catholic coun- 
 tries. It is their conception of the ideal Catho- 
 lic Queen, a martyr to her faith,. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, on the other hand, in his 
 "Abbot" presents a portrait to be expected 
 from a chivalrous gentleman and patriotic 
 Scotchman. His Mary is a pathetic figure of 
 romance, more sinned against than sinning. 
 
 In Schiller's drama, too, the pathetic side, 
 the pitiful aspect of Mary is likewise pre- 
 sented. 
 
 Swinburne, on the other hand, paints a 
 heartless, pitiless, corrupt wretch, a Gothic 
 Venus, feeding on the blood of her lovers, a 
 harlot-hearted creature who clips and kisses 
 Chatelard even when she is planning his death ; 
 who is in love with Bothwell even before the 
 
 104
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 murder of Riccio and Darnley. Swinburne 
 accepts as practically true the accusations 
 made by Knox and Buchanan, the confession 
 of French Paris, the revelations of the casket 
 letters and sonnets. In no manner does he 
 give Mary the benefit of any doubt. His huge 
 plays constitute a romance written in dramat- 
 ic verse, but marred by bias and often by 
 long rhetorical passages, although in such 
 scenes as Knox's denunciation of Mary and 
 in the death scene of Darnley he attains a 
 height of dramatic verse not often equalled 
 in the igth century. 
 
 To Scott the tragedy of Mary's career was 
 her loss of the throne. 
 
 To Swinburne, it was the loss of her lover. 
 
 To Mr. Hewlett, and therein lies his truest 
 inspiration, the tragedy consisted in the 
 breaking of the queen's heart. Loss of a 
 throne, of friends, of a lover were as nothing 
 to this. So long as her heart maintained its 
 dauntless Stuart courage, so long as she was 
 self-reliant, brave, and high-spirited, she could 
 face the world. Once her heart was broken, 
 however, her world crumbled beneath her feet 
 and she crept away a pitiful, beaten, broken 
 thing to whom death were welcome. 
 
 105
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Swinburne has insisted upon the fact tl\at 
 Mary, even in her girlhood, was not innocent. 
 He has dwelt upon the fact that the French 
 court of the Medicis was a wicked, corrupt 
 place and that th,ose, who attended it and 
 dwelt in it, were perforce acquainted with 
 wickedness, even when not evil themselves. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett has displayed true artistry by 
 insisting upon the essential girlishness of 
 Mary, upon her initial innocence. There are 
 too many portraits drawn of her as the woman 
 with, stage tragedy-queen airs, rather than 
 as the young girl, placed in exalted station, 
 petted and spoiled, in love with brightness, 
 gaiety and song; half French in blood and 
 wholly French in temperament. 
 
 The chilling influence of the Scotland of 
 the Renaissance period wh,en Knox flourished 
 is skillfully shown by Mr. Hewlett. 
 
 "The Queen's Quair" gives the atmosphere 
 of Scotland. The book is filled with it. It 
 colours the scenes. It colours his very style 
 itself. In the second chapter of th,e first book 
 the Scottish atmosphere is, as it were, the 
 protagonist. The reader perceives how this 
 grey Scotland with its fogs, its chills, 
 its people so quietly and keenly watch- 
 
 106
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 ing Mary, scrutinizing the fine manners of 
 her French gallants and yelling objurgations 
 at her French priests, made her long for 
 France. This young girl loves love, she loves 
 smiles, she loves plaudits. She dresses in her 
 prettiest, poses h,er most picturesque, and 
 then some point at her, some shake their 
 heads, none salutes her. They stare! "There 
 is no love here," says the chilled lass. She 
 laughs only twice from the time she lands on 
 Leith shore until she rides into Holyrood- 
 house. 
 
 The feuds between the Hamiltons, the Len- 
 noxes and the Hepburns, the dominating in- 
 fluence of Knox, the hatred of popery and 
 foreign finery are indicated. All the tragedy 
 to come is felt in th,is chapter as inevitably 
 as the doom of mortals is felt and fore- 
 shadowed, in Greek drama. And she so young 
 to be so doomed! Look at her as Mr. Hew- 
 lett has painted her in that enchanting way 
 he has when painting women: 
 
 "A tall, slim girl, petted and pettish pale 
 (yet not unwholesome), chestnut-haired, she 
 looked like a flower of the heat, lax and deli- 
 cate. Her skin — but more, the very flesh of 
 her — seemed transparent, with colour that 
 
 107
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 warmed it from within, faintly, with a glow 
 of fine rose. * * * The Cardinal, who was no 
 rhapsodist of the sort, admitted her clear skin, 
 admitted her patent royalty, but denied that 
 she was a beautiful girl — even for a queen. 
 Her nose, he judged, was too long, her lips 
 were too thin, her eyes too narrow. He de- 
 tested h,er trick of the sidelong look. Her 
 lower lids were nearly straight, her upper 
 rather heavy; between them they gave her a 
 sleepy appearance, sometimes a sly appear- 
 ance, when, slowly lifting, they revealed the 
 glimmering hazel of the eyes themselves. 
 Hazel, I say, if hazel they were, which some- 
 times seemed to be yellow, and sometimes 
 showed all black; the light acted upon hers 
 as upon a cat's eyes. Beautiful she may not 
 have been T though Monsieur Brantome would 
 never allow it ; but fine, fine she was all over — 
 sharply, exquisitely cut and .modelled; her 
 sweet, smooth chin, her amorous lips, bright 
 red where all else was pale as a tinged rose; 
 her sensitive nose; her broad, high brows; 
 her neck which two hands could hold, her 
 small shoulders, and bosom of a child. And 
 then her hands, her waist no bigger than a 
 stalk, her little feet !" 
 
 1 08
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 Such the girl whose beauty was to be 
 marred by salt tears, whose boldness was to 
 be crushed out of her, whose high, courage 
 was to avail her naught, who was to be the 
 wife of a sodden fool and awake too soon to 
 a complete knowledge of his folly, only to be 
 the leman of a swashbuckling Hepburn and 
 learn too late th,at she had thrown away every- 
 thing in the world and received nothing in re- 
 turn. 
 
 "Richard" failed as a chronicle novel be- 
 cause of its divided purpose and its divided 
 story. "The Queen's Quair" succeeds where 
 "Richard" fails. There is in the bigger book 
 no divided purpose. Mr. Hewlett has kept 
 h,is eye on the one main point throughout, — 
 a depiction of the gradual change in Mary's 
 character; how it hardened; how she was on 
 a continuous quest for a lover who would be 
 absolutely true to her and at the same time 
 be her master in all things; and how she 
 broke her heart over the disappointment of 
 it. 
 
 The book is, indeed, as Mr. Hewlett him- 
 self called it, a "tragic essay." From first to 
 last, Mary is in the foreground. It is her 
 thoughts, her actions, her impulses, her emo- 
 
 109
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 tions, her sayings, her sufferings with which 
 he is concerned. If a chronicle novel is ever 
 to be a success, this is it. Real history is in 
 it. Th,e real woman is in it. Real life is in 
 it. If the reader does not know Mary after 
 studying this book, he will never know her. 
 There is nothing of importance omitted that 
 the dry-as-dust historians have told us. There 
 is much, added that they have not presented, 
 because it could come only from the direct 
 inventive inspiration allowed to the novelist 
 and the poet. Mr. Hewlett has been so care- 
 ful as to his facts and so wonderfully success- 
 ful in his inventions that he has presented a 
 veritable human document. The novel fol- 
 lows th,e actual historical sequence and thus, 
 in the main, presents a plot unrivalled by the 
 invention of all but the supremest minds of 
 the ages, wh,ile its series of dramatic situations 
 are such as to call forth all the powers of the 
 novelist in the depiction of the pitiful and th,e 
 terrible, as well as the beautiful and the pas- 
 sionate. That is why this novel is so much 
 truer than history books. History tells that 
 certain men lived at certain times and per- 
 formed certain deeds, glorious or despicable, 
 as th,e case may be. History tells why kings 
 
 no
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 went to war and why kings were deposed. 
 It tells something of the state of the people 
 during the various events of which it treats. 
 The reader may see some distance inside an 
 era, but not inside the minds and hearts of the 
 great actors in the comedies and tragedies of 
 history. And that is where Dumas' boast 
 about the functions of the historical novelist 
 is noteworthy. For the historical novelist, 
 when he does present a great piece of work, 
 throws a search-light into the human heart. 
 In this chronicle novel by Mr. Hewlett, with 
 its very decided psychologica 1 tendencies, 
 there is shown not only the heart of Mary, 
 but the base ones of the knaves and traitors 
 who ruined her life and career. It is made 
 clear that her so-called intellectuality con- 
 sisted in her girlish love of French songs, her 
 Guisian passion for intrigue, and her Gallic 
 wit, ready for most occasions, save when 
 pitted against her dour Scotchmen. At the 
 great crises of her life, it was not her intel- 
 lectual processes that formed the main-springs 
 of her actions. Personal passions — violent 
 loves and hates, likes and dislikes — these were 
 the things that moved her to take the steps 
 that were ultimately to lead her to ruin. The 
 
 in
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 very things that made her appealing as a 
 woman made her unsuccessful as a monarch. 
 Mr. Hewlett does not seek to extenuate h,er 
 part in the murder of Darnley, nor her guilty 
 passion for Bothwell. He depicts her as she 
 in all probability was, — a bewildering, puzzling 
 mixture of good and evil, of girlish charm and 
 boyish bravado, of frankness and falsity, by 
 turns loving and hating, fascinating and re- 
 pelling, laughing and weeping; now, for poli- 
 cy's sake, pardoning her sworn enemies, now 
 making savage promises of the terrible ven- 
 geance she would wreak on their heads. And 
 despite all this, Mr. Hewlett, without the 
 slightest hint of favouritism or partisanship, 
 manages to convey the belief that if Darnley 
 had been a red-blooded man instead of a 
 whimpering fool, or if Bothwell had been her 
 husband instead of Darnley, and had treated 
 her well, there would have been a better Mary 
 and a happier Scotland. He has shown how 
 largely she was doomed to her fate; how her 
 own training, how the Scotland of her era, 
 and the men who dominated it, all tended to 
 make her what she was. Every event depicted 
 in the book works to that end. Every inci- 
 dent shows how some of the sweetness was 
 
 112
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 sapped out of her; how she began to meet 
 treachery with treachery; how sh,e plotted to 
 foil the plotters ; how she used those who 
 would make her their instrument; how she, 
 who was distrusted, began to suspect all 
 around her, save a few women and some boys 
 and girls, — until she made the fatal mistake 
 of trusting Bothwell. 
 
 Six years wrought great differences in her. 
 She was no longer self-reliant, the boy had 
 disappeared from her nature, and she was all 
 weak woman, the kind of woman who is meek 
 in love's service, who places herself at the 
 feet of the loved one, and is humble and 
 timid and clinging in all the ways th,at woman 
 can humble herself and cling. The picture of 
 the queen uncrowned of her womanhood by 
 desire long denied is not a pretty one. It is 
 almost pathologic in its minuteness, in its ter- 
 rible, scientific intensity. 
 
 Swinburne in "Bothwell" has given a 
 glimpse of this period. Even Schiller places 
 in th,e mouth of Hannah Kennedy, many years 
 afterward, a reminiscence of that unhappy and 
 unhealthy time. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett, steadfast to truth, depicts 
 Mary, the queen all unqueenly, the woman all 
 
 113
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 unwomanly, a thing only of fevered, tortured 
 desire, — hectic, animal, repugnant. 
 
 He believes as deeply as did the people of 
 the Renaissance in the overmastering power 
 and the important place of passion and desire. 
 
 Hear him, for a moment, on this point. It 
 applies not only to this book, but to the "Little 
 Novels," to "Richard" and to "New Canter- 
 bury Tales," to all of which critics have made 
 objections because of certain passages: 
 
 "As to the Flesh : we are clothed in it, don't 
 want to be without it, and cannot continue in 
 life divested of it. I profess to deal with 
 life, and do not see why I should shrink from 
 speaking of it as it was, is, and will always 
 be. The characters in my novels are men and 
 women, and when I see them doing things 
 which men and women do — kissing and mat- 
 ing, as well as praying and fighting, I say so 
 and make no bones. I have never in my life 
 been suggestive for the sake of lust, and never 
 prurient. But I do not see why I should 
 leave out one half of life, when I am writing 
 for men and women who are alive." 
 
 There is no passage in Mr. Hewlett's work 
 to which an honest critic can make objections 
 on the score of fleshliness for its own sake. 
 
 H4
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 The so-called fleshy episodes are all necessary 
 parts of the stories in which they occur. So 
 here in Mary's book, these passages, painful 
 though they may be in many ways, are neces- 
 sary to a comprehension of Mary's relations 
 with Botrrwell, are necessary above all to a 
 fitting comprehension of that wonderful chap- 
 ter, "The Bride's Prelude." They are neces- 
 sary in order to understand the full force of 
 the crushing blow which was dealt Mary when 
 sh,e finally learned that she had given up 
 everything for him whom she deemed her true 
 lover and strong master, only to find that once 
 more she had been tricked; that Bothwell 
 loved his bonny Jean Gordon and secretly 
 called h,er wife, while publicly proclaiming his 
 passion for the Queen. So powerful is Mr. 
 Hewlett's art, so convincing is his narrative, 
 that he leads the reader to believe indeed, that 
 nothing that happens after this discovery is 
 of moment to Mary. 
 
 He has not made the mistake of expending 
 all his force of convincement upon the portrait 
 of the Queen. The host of characters who 
 played a part in the great tragedy are limned 
 with clearness and distinctness. 
 
 The wiles of Lethington, the kingly man- 
 
 ii5
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 ner of Knox, the croaking of the ruthless 
 Ruthven, the craft of Riccio; the spider plot- 
 ting of the tall, pale, prim James, Earl of 
 Moray, who looked through his fingers at 
 what was going on around him; th,e burly 
 Morton; the jaunty, wilful, laughing Both- 
 well, — these men are depicted with no more 
 care than the foppish Chatelard, the roguish 
 French Paris, the devoted and loving lad, Des 
 Essars, Mr. Hewlett's own superb creation. 
 
 Their true characters are flashed out in a 
 phrase, as when French. Paris exclaims: "Oh, 
 Monsieur de Moray, Monsieur de Moray! is 
 not your lordship the archetype and everlast- 
 ing pattern of all rats that are and shall be 
 in this world?" 
 
 Think of the sinking ships Moray deserted, 
 of how th,is trickster was always prepared 
 with an alibi, of his absence when Riccio was 
 murdered, when Darnley was hurled into 
 eternity, think of these things and the rat- 
 like character of the plotter is made manifest. 
 Or consider b,ow Darnley is revealed in a sen- 
 tence: "Those bold eyes of his were as blank 
 as the windows of an empty house." By such 
 methods as these, not only is the man's stu- 
 pidity shown, but all his other faults — the fool 
 
 116
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 in hjs folly, the weakling in his weakness, the 
 loose liver in his license. 
 
 Going outside of history, the novelist height- 
 ens the interest of his book, increases its air 
 of veracity, imposes his beliefs and inspira- 
 tions upon the reader by a method something 
 like that used in "Richard." Only here it has 
 been perfected to such a pitch that it hardly 
 seems artifice. Just as in "Richard" the nar- 
 rative was at times carried on by extracts 
 from Milo's work, so here in this novel the 
 main source of information is the suppositi- 
 tious little volume : "Le Secret des Secrets," 
 written by Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des Essars, 
 a pale-faced wise-looking French boy whose 
 history is sufficiently indicated by this : 
 
 "The Sieur Des Essars — a gentleman of 
 Brabant — disporting in La Beauce, accosts a 
 pretty Disaster (to call her so) with a speak- 
 ing eye — " 
 
 This French boy, page to Bothwell, is bound 
 over to the service of Mary while sh,e is in 
 France. He becomes her devoted servant, 
 friend, and lover. He is supposed to be in 
 close contact with the Queen's party from 
 the day she sets out for Scotland until the 
 day when she departs for Lochleven as a pris- 
 
 117
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 oner. His book, half confession, half diary, is 
 called upon constantly for confirmation of the 
 story. In it Mr. Hewlett has not only imbedded 
 much historic fact, but likewise much that h,e 
 has imagined of Mary. Not only is Des Essars 
 quoted to show how th,e foolish Darnley re- 
 ferred to the "fond queen," but he gives an 
 insight into the mental processes of the 
 Queen, into the tribulations of her heart, into 
 the passions of her naked soul. But Des Es- 
 sars is not the only witness. Mr. Hewlett 
 created him, having Nau partly in mind. He 
 recreated French Paris. The histories tell 
 something of wh,at the rogue said when put to 
 the torture. Mr. Hewlett's way is easier and 
 more humane. Cross Paris' palm with a coin 
 and away he chatters of his master Bothwell 
 and of the Queen. Th,e talk is stamped with 
 the mark of truth, even as are the letters Mr. 
 Hewlett has written for Bothwell and the ex- 
 tracts from the diary of the Master of Sempill. 
 To h,ave so absorbed the spirit of the bygone 
 age as to be able to reproduce it in diary, in 
 letters, in conversation, and in book extracts, 
 is a veritable triumph of invention. It serves 
 as an extension of known historic facts; it 
 
 118
 
 THE QUEEN'S QUAIR 
 
 bolsters the novel and adds to its clutch upon 
 credulity. 
 
 The author is said to have revised and re- 
 written the novel four times. After a second 
 and third reading of th,e book, some concep- 
 tion is gained of its richness and weight and 
 worth, of the world of labour that was needed 
 to compress even within the limits of this big 
 volume something of the life of this big time. 
 The careful student then begins to understand 
 the genuine inspiration that made these Ren- 
 aissance figures very much alive, that filled 
 their veins, not with ink, but with rich, red, 
 passionate blood. Mr. Hewlett's "Quair" is 
 a nineteenth century masterpiece which need 
 fear no comparison with, the historical novels 
 of his great predecessors. 
 
 119
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY. 
 
 WHEN it was announced in 1904 that 
 the Hewlett book for the year was to 
 be a monumental travel book entitled, 
 "The Road in Tuscany," many were disap- 
 pointed. Here was one of the finest writers 
 of his day, taking his papers in "Quarterly 
 Review," "Speaker" and the "Cornhill" maga- 
 zine and extending them into two volumes. 
 
 There is little of the first, fine, careless, 
 boyish rapture that so marked "Earthwork;" 
 there is nothing approaching "Quattrocen- 
 tisteria" or the studies of Ilaria and Bettina 
 or the "Sacrifice at Prato." Instead, there is 
 a maturer man, a more sophisticated traveller, 
 and, likewise, one who h,as lost some of his 
 illusions. However, Mr. Hewlett could still 
 say the Tuscans are "the most alert, charming, 
 intelligent, curious people in Europe." He 
 could still affirm much of his old love in the 
 credo : — 
 
 "This is the singular quality of Italy — a 
 
 120
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 land of the people never at one and never at 
 rest, always fine in act, and always distin- 
 guished in its presentation — that at every turn 
 of the road, and at every revolution of the 
 centuries, she is able to stab you to the heart." 
 
 But if there is indeed, nothing in this work 
 that quite distinctly challenges the contents 
 of "Earthwork" for quality, there is yet much 
 meat for enjoyment. It does what he him- 
 self has said in another connection are the 
 three indispensables for a travel book: "it in- 
 spires travel, it illuminates travel, and it re- 
 calls it." 
 
 As always with Mr. Hewlett, the people of 
 the country have been the main consideration. 
 He has been content to allow Mr. Murray to 
 point out the glory of museum after museum; 
 to concede to Ruskin the right of pulpiteer; 
 and to Mr. Grant Allen the pov. er of the 
 school master. He has been willing to allow 
 Herr Baedeker to state mere facts for the 
 traveller-in-a-hurry, for Baedeker "saw the 
 museum, but I saw the custode of it, a very 
 noble priest. He saw the fresco, but I its 
 poor patient proprietress. He saw th,e inn 
 and said it was a good one. So it is; but I 
 saw the innkeeper's pretty daughter, and was 
 
 121
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 witness to the unuttered, unutterable passion 
 of the waiter for her." 
 
 In other words, there is the whimsical, en- 
 gaging Hewlett for guide and mentor, in- 
 stead of the dehumanized cicerone, become a 
 mere megaphone for the dreary recital of 
 drearier statistics and historical dates. In- 
 corrigible teller of tales, he has sturdily main- 
 tained in this set of books that the way to 
 tell the history of the towns h,e visited is not 
 to tell it — if the bull may be allowed. Instead, 
 he says he must get at the biography of each 
 town, each biography being a sum of the life 
 stories of its citizens, of th,e "men who sat at 
 its councils, ruled its markets, built its 
 churches, painted its walls, and wrote its 
 little books and sonnets; yes, and sang under 
 its daughter's windows o' nights, and hoed its 
 vines and pruned its olives, and urged its 
 great pale oxen along its furrows." To get at 
 these things, he has felt it necessary to leave 
 the beaten path and take to the road, "th,e 
 greatest leveller after death," colouring all 
 alike with sweat and grime. And so he has 
 taken as his exemplars in writing the work, 
 the old road books of his grandfathers' day. 
 And with, the road come the joys of it, unflagg- 
 
 122
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 ing high spirits, a constant sense of the 
 humourous in things, a delight in all he sees, 
 an impatience with the pedants who wish to 
 make the love of good pictures over into an 
 exclusive cult to wh,ich mere Philistines are 
 not to be admitted. And this feeling is re- 
 flected again and again in witty or humourous 
 or fantastic sayings. 
 
 It is precisely these whimsical things, 
 coupled with his expressed views on history, 
 on art, and on literature, together with his 
 little inventions scattered throughout the two 
 volumes that make the work worth while. 
 The reader may never go to Italy and may 
 not visit Tuscan hill towns if he does go. 
 Conceivably h,e may not be interested in the 
 facts about these places, but as a student of 
 Mr. Hewlett's books, he is interested in what 
 the author reveals of himself. 
 
 Thus Mr. Hewlett once more proclaims his 
 love for Dante. He does it in comments that 
 are very expressive of hjs own personality. 
 Here is one that contains just the quirk of 
 style, just the strain of whimsicality, just the 
 tang of character that anyone who reads Mr. 
 Hewlett's work is quick to recognize, but 
 which is so hard to define. 
 
 123
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 It affords another delightful example of how 
 informing, how amusing, and how "contenta- 
 tious" and creative a literary critic Mr. Hew- 
 lett would have been had he devoted himself 
 to such work. 
 
 Speaking of Beatrice and Dante : "He 
 loved this green-e}'ed girl, and, because he 
 loved, freed his immortal part, and towered 
 higher than any of th,e sons of men. For if 
 our Milton heard God speak, this man dared 
 look Him in the face, take his stand with 
 Saint John and Saint James below the burning 
 throne of Heaven, and see his beloved as- 
 sumed into the very heart of Mary. This it 
 is to be a lover. If he paid more than lovers' 
 honour to the green-eyed girl, what did she 
 not do for him? She gave him strength to 
 soar, taught him the mystery of Beauty and 
 Desire, 'imparadised his mind.' Who she was, 
 or what, whether gentle or simple, maid, wife 
 or widow, a beauty or a scold, tall or short, 
 (I myself believe she was a little woman), it 
 is no matter. She imparadised his mind. He 
 repaid her with such sort as no woman, save 
 the Queen of women, has ever received of man. 
 But she had given h,im the keys to Heaven. 
 It is enough for us to be sure that she was 
 
 124
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 lovely and good, had green eyes and died 
 young. To which I add for my private con- 
 tentation — that she was a little woman." 
 
 Thus Mr. Hewlett, wh,en his real enthusi- 
 asm is aroused. But Dante is almost the 
 only man in Italian literature who does it. He 
 likes Dante because he is company for the 
 out-of-doors- man as well as for the man who 
 desires to ponder in the library. And that 
 leads to the chief fault he finds with the other 
 Tuscan writers. He complains that they tell 
 him little of Tuscany and are not illuminative 
 of Tuscans. They are indoor company and 
 their books are library affairs. There is not 
 enough wind and sun and sky in their books 
 to suit him. The result is that in mentioning 
 most of the Italians, whom many critics have 
 agreed to call great, he plays the devil's ad- 
 vocate and very amusingly he plays it too, 
 with a downrightness of opinion that brooks 
 no denial, with a hardheaded conviction that 
 they are small men, comparatively speaking, 
 and so not worthy much time and study. 
 
 There is the same independence of attitude 
 in Mr. Hewlett when it comes to examining 
 the great pictures to be seen in Italy and also 
 when it comes to differing with the art pun- 
 
 125
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 dits. He has very little respect for the self- 
 appointed guides. Again and again, with 
 almost a touch of personal grievance, he has 
 his fling at them, — Ruskin, Grant Allen, Mr. 
 Berenson. Right in the beginning of his 
 book, he contemptuously says he knows the 
 trend of modern art criticism which does not 
 concern itself with the questions: "Did A 
 paint this and was it worth painting?" but 
 rather, "Wh,o among all known or unknown 
 painters may have painted such and such, 
 hitherto universally attributed to A?" And 
 when it comes to the subject of Ghirlandajo, 
 he resents being called a superior Philistine 
 when he waxes enthusiastic over the work of 
 "the most Flemish of the Florentine painters." 
 "I do seriously maintain," he says in heat, 
 "th,at pictures, statues, great churches being 
 there, are to be treated as part of the land- 
 scape — like trees or waterfalls; that they are 
 for convenience, not cult; that they are ad- 
 mirable for their use, not useful for the ad- 
 miration they extort from us. It is good to 
 admire, enthusiasm is above rubies; yet it is 
 better to admire a man in his handiwork, than 
 his handiwork in a man. Moreover — and this 
 
 126
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 is corollary — there is more, and better stuff 
 than dilettantism in every one of us." 
 
 And so having demolished art critics to his 
 own satisfaction, even though he has to adopt 
 a few euphuisms to do it, he shows the cour- 
 age of his convictions by launching into an 
 apostrophe which recalls another of the mas- 
 ters who taught Mr. Hewlett some of the 
 graces of his prose. Is there not the very echo 
 of the gentle Elia in such as this? "Incom- 
 parable Ghirlandajo! Shrewdest, most humor- 
 ous, inexh,austiblest of painters, what should 
 we know of the great world of Florence with- 
 out thee and thy twinkling eye? Hast thou 
 missed not one? Where hast thou scrupled 
 to place them, in what august company of 
 gods and demigods? Who are those frost- 
 bitten acquaintances of our Redeemer, these 
 hard men in red who stand about while He 
 suffers baptism or changes water into wine 
 at Cana — who are they but Ser Luca and Ser 
 Cosimo, and other stout oneyers of the count- 
 ing-house and Mercato Nuovo?' 
 
 In these volumes Mr. Hewlett has given 
 some of his thoughts on history, too. Indeed, 
 he has written appendices which are in them- 
 
 127
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 selves little chapters on the history of the 
 various towns, or rather "nations" as he prefers 
 to call them. He has always had a decided 
 leaning toward historical study. 
 
 He h,as stated that some day he expects to 
 do some work in the way of historical writ- 
 ing. In the appendices in the volumes under 
 consideration, Mr. Hewlett openly writes him- 
 self the pupil of Carlyle. His sentences are 
 jerky, eccentric, often elliptical. There is 
 lacking his usual music and in its place is a 
 prose giving th,e very essence of history, but 
 history in its bare bones. 
 
 In addition to Tuscan art and literature, he 
 discusses the folk, who he says, are always 
 more interesting than their work. In ap- 
 proaching this subject, he has two methods, 
 the methods of the novelist outright, and of 
 old George Borrow. In his first character, 
 
 Mr. Hewlett gives various "Little Novels." 
 There is, for instance, the story of Donna 
 Berta and Ser Martino. They are the typical 
 Tuscan Darby and Joan. He says it was the 
 magnificoes who blew trumpets and levied 
 wars, but it was its Bertas and Martinos who 
 made Florence. And so he tries to draw them 
 
 128
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 — the thrifty house-wife ,guarding her hus- 
 band's gear and presenting him straightlimbed 
 sons and handsome daughters; and the indus- 
 trious husband, advancing step by step to 
 higher honours in the service of his Florence. 
 
 It was Borrow who showed that romance 
 was not dead; that one did not have to fare 
 far afield for it; that one could take the road 
 in any country, and every bend in the long, 
 winding, white way would bring its little 
 comedy or tragedy. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett found this to be true. Let 
 Borrow have his wonderful gipsies mingling 
 the poetry of th,e good brown earth with canny 
 talk of horses and pugilism. He has certainly 
 given no more solid amusement than the read- 
 er derives from Mr. Hewlett's advance down 
 the road to Pistoja. The latter found himself 
 jostling with a sharp-faced, bristle-bearded 
 countryman, carrying tools and a wickered 
 flask of wine. The younger Borrow falls into 
 talk with him. He learns that the people are 
 pouring into the city to do honour to the 
 relics of San Atto, the Bishop. Whereupon 
 the Englishman gives his sad reflections to the 
 brother of tb,e road. They do these things 
 
 129
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 better in Italy. There is more reverence and 
 more honesty in the reverence. 
 
 The Englishman is curious as to his com- 
 panion's name. Of all the names in the world 
 it is Gino Cancellieri! Whereupon Mr. Hew- 
 lett, having duly had a meditation about the 
 history of Pistoja and its rulers, begins: 
 
 " 'Your forefather, my dear sir,' I ended, 
 'was tyrant of Pistoja.' 
 
 "The last of the Cancellieri took this at 
 first with great phlegm.' 
 
 " 'He may have been, for all I know,' he 
 said; 'but my own father was a road-mender, 
 and broke stones betwixt Piastre and Cireglio. 
 He was famous for it. You have been walk- 
 ing on his metal this morning, I doubt, and 
 permit me to say there is no better. Tyrant 
 of Pistoja was he? Well, there's a trade for a 
 man!' The humour of it now tickling him, 
 he laughed gaily. I said that I considered it a 
 less reputable trade th,an road-mending; but 
 Cancellieri would have his laugh out now that 
 he had caught it. 
 
 "'Why, it may be so,' he allowed, 'I don't 
 care to dispute it. But what gravels me is 
 th,e justice of it. My grandfather, as you may 
 
 130
 
 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY 
 
 say, walked soft-footed upon the sweat of 
 the Pistolesi , and here are the Pistolesi doing 
 the same by my father. Well, that's as good 
 as a comedy any day.' " 
 
 There is no better place to stop than this. 
 It is a charming episode charmingly told. 
 
 131
 
 THE BRAZENHEAD CYCLUS. 
 
 SOME day there is to be a complete 
 Brazenhead cyclus. Mr. Hewlett him- 
 self has promised it. There is a view of 
 the redoubtable Captain in a story of Italy by 
 him in the "New Canterbury Tales." In "Fond 
 Adventures" there is the complete history of 
 how he came to join the pilgrimage of the 
 Prioress of Ambresbury; of his relations with 
 all the persons mentioned in the "New Canter- 
 bury Tales ;" of his services in Jack Cade's war; 
 and, finally, of how he rendered certain as- 
 sistance to Percival Perceforest, who becom- 
 ing Lord Say, made the war-worn Captain, 
 "Steward of the Manors of Westerham, Knock- 
 holt and Froghole with, a reversion of the 
 Office of High Bailiff of the Lordship of 
 Sevenoaks." 
 
 In "The Countess of Picpus," published in 
 Putnam's Monthly Magazine in April, May, 
 and June, 1907 there is an earlier adventure 
 of Brazenhead when England and Burgundy 
 
 132
 
 THE BRAZENHEAD CYCLUS 
 
 were allied against France; an adventure in 
 Provence, where Brazenhead masqueraded as 
 the Count of Picpus, rendered a service to a 
 nobleman and a lady in distress, and inciden- 
 tally won for himself a mistress, proving the 
 truth of an old rhyme of Boccacio's that there 
 is kissing yet in a kissed mouth. In the very 
 last paragraph of this story there is a promise 
 of still others: 
 
 "I am learning it by staves at a time; it is 
 but a portion of the great Brazenhead cyclus; 
 and some day " 
 
 In a letter concerning him there is a similar 
 promise : 
 
 "Brazenhead is a standby. I keep him until 
 I want him, and have a look at him now and 
 then." 
 
 It is for these reasons that this chapter is 
 adorned by Brazenhead's name rather than 
 by the title of the next volume by Mr. Hewlett 
 in the order of its publication, — "Fond Ad- 
 ventures." 
 
 It is not hard to see that Brazenhead is a 
 prime favorite with Hewlett. Upon his name, 
 as a peg, are ultimately to be hung many 
 stories that have occurred to Mr. Hewlett 
 during his study of the 15th century period 
 
 133
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 when England, France, and Italy afforded so 
 much chance for romantic or ridiculous or 
 picaresque adventure. Brazenhead, himself, 
 is at once romantic, ridiculous, and picar- 
 esque. A swashbuckler who will really fight, 
 a poet without letters, a user of foreign 
 phrases without much knowledge of foreign 
 tongues, a bombastic liar who delights in mas- 
 querades, he is a lineal descendant of those 
 great figures in literature, — Falstaff, Bom- 
 bastes Furioso, Tartarin, Cyrano and the 
 swashbucklers of Dumas. Mr. Hewlett takes 
 something from each, of these. He adds to it 
 characteristics culled from old chronicles, or 
 created by his own fancy. Brazenhead is a 
 plaything of Mr. Hewlett's. The author de- 
 lights in him, pokes fun at h,im, burlesques 
 him. He cannot rest with simple descriptions 
 of him. He must needs caricature him out of 
 sheer high animal spirits. Some day, mayhap, 
 Mr. Hewlett will come to love h,im, will begin 
 to approach him in graver and tenderer mood. 
 It is difficult to know where to begin to des- 
 cribe this "free routier." Captain Salamon 
 Brazenhead, late of Burgundy, formerly of 
 Milan is a "lean man of six feet two inches, 
 of inordinate thirst, of two scars on his face, 
 
 134
 
 THE BRAZENHEAD CYCLUS 
 
 a notched forefinger, a majestic nose, of a long 
 sword, two daggers and a stolen horse, of ex- 
 perience in various kinds of villainy, yet of 
 simple tastes." 
 
 Here is the description of a nose that marks 
 the possessor as own cousin to Cyrano: 
 
 "I prefer a paean on his nose, a trumpet, an 
 ensign built on imperial lines: broad-rooted, 
 full of gristle, ridged with sharp bone, abound- 
 ing in callus, tapering exquisitely to a point, 
 very flexible and quick. With this weapon 
 of offence or defiance he could sneer you from 
 manhood's portly presence to a line of shame, 
 with it comb h,is mustachios. When he was 
 deferential it kissed his lip; combative, it 
 cocked his hat. It was a nose one could pat 
 with some pretense; scratched, it was set on 
 fire, you could see it smouldering in the dusk. 
 Into the vexed dabate, whether great noses are 
 invariable with great men, I shall not enter. 
 Captain Brazenhead was great, and he had a 
 great nose." That, of course, is a cartoon in 
 words, nothing more, nothing less. 
 
 Brazenhead is a boaster. He tells his hear- 
 ers that kings are h,is familiar divinities, dwell- 
 ers upon his very hearthstone. Once launched 
 upon a sea of lies, he will declare that he is 
 
 135
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 the seventh son of a seventh son, will boast 
 of ladies' favour, will tell of quarrels with the 
 Pope at Avignon. He will confide that Sir 
 John Falstaff was his friend and that he knew 
 the king well and called him "Harry." 
 
 In his talk he will use scraps of anecdotes, 
 choice phrases from various tongues, classical 
 allusions that will make his hearers think him 
 learned, until they see him adroitly conceal- 
 ing the fact that he can not read. 
 
 Now all this makes h«im the routier of the 
 15th century to be met with in ancient chron- 
 icles, raised to the Nth power of caricature. 
 With one subtle touch, however, Mr. Hewlett 
 gives a glimpse into the deeper heart of th,e 
 man, of him who befriends young lovers, who 
 strives for their joy and masquerades for their 
 safety. The magnificent lies, the studied at- 
 titudes, the strange caperings of the lean, 
 hairy soldier are those of one who is a poet at 
 heart, who dramatizes himself in episode 
 after episode. This mercenary, who loves the 
 clink of gold and wh,o can give the greatest 
 pains to the conquest of a serving maid whose 
 pretty hair touches his fancy, is so much of 
 a poet and nature lover that a field of cow- 
 slips sends him into raptures: "My fresh beau- 
 
 136
 
 THE BRAZENHEAD CYCLUS 
 
 ties! My dairy-delights," he cries, "I would 
 as soon trample my mother's grave as your 
 wagging golden heads." 
 
 He who loves flowers with a poet's and 
 child's clean delight is something more than 
 a cartoon routier of the Middle Ages. Some 
 day, wh,en age has burned some of the lust 
 out of him, when his blood has cooled, when 
 his brain is less inventive of bombastic fictions, 
 the inner core of Salamon will be revealed 
 There are stories of love and war in his career, 
 one may be sure. And when th,e picture is 
 complete, when the last chapter has been 
 written, it will be discovered that the cartoon 
 man has a heart, that h,e has something more 
 than a figure at whose contemplation "fat 
 laughter holds his sides." 
 
 "Fond Adventures" contained in addition to 
 the tale about Brazenhead, three other stories. 
 "The Heart's Key," a tale of troubadour 
 France, and "Buondelmonte's Saga" and "The 
 Love Chase," two more little novels of Italy. 
 "The Heart's Key" is a light thing in Mr. Hew- 
 lett's romantic vein. 
 
 "The Love Chase" is a little comedy which 
 goes dangerously near to tragedy. It is a 
 
 137
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 saga of Renaissance Italian poets, condo- 
 tierri, and great churchmen, — in their pursuit 
 of one who "is rather young, very pale and 
 who partakes of the nature of a dove." 
 
 After all, however, "Fond Adventures" 
 marked no new achievement by its author; 
 and represented him in no new line of work. 
 
 138
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT. 
 
 IN "The Fool Errant" the author bids good- 
 by not only to the old times of the Renais- 
 sance, but also to much of the former 
 Hewlett manner. The novel is a story of 18th 
 century Italy, filled with the tone and colour 
 of that period. 
 
 It is not a little singular that in commenting 
 upon the probable inspirations of the book, 
 none of the commentators mentioned Beyle. 
 Mr. Richard Holbrook, writing in the Book- 
 man in 1906 on "Some probable sources of 
 Mr. Hewlett's Fool Errant" laid especial 
 stress upon "Don Quixote." He saw in the 
 hero another Don; he saw in Aurelia another 
 Dulcinea, idealized in the brain of the wor- 
 shipper; he saw in the little peasant Virginia 
 another Sancho Panza. 
 
 Still another saw in Strelley of Upcote a 
 Joseph Andrews at large in 18th century Italy, 
 instead of 18th century England. None of the 
 critics seemingly remembered that some years 
 ago Mr. Hewlett wrote an eloquent and en- 
 
 139
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 thusiastic introduction to a new English, 
 translation of Beyle's "La Chartreuse de 
 Parme," in which he declared it as his sober 
 belief that this novel was the greatest France 
 had produced. It is in this introduction that 
 he speaks of the hero Fabrice as a "divine 
 Italian fool salted over with French wit." 
 Copying this, one might say that Strelley is 
 a divine fool, guided and protected by a dewy 
 innocence almost proof against worldliness. 
 It is no reflection upon Mr. Hewlett's art to 
 surmise that something of Cervantes, some- 
 thing of Fielding, and something of Beyle was 
 in his mind when he conceived this story. 
 
 If you take an "innocent abroad" like Joseph 
 Andrews, endow him with the dreams of th,e 
 Don, and set him atilt against the Italy 
 Beyle loved, you will have something of which 
 "The Fool Errant," is all compact. Only 
 something, however. For to the compound 
 you must add Mr. Hewlett's romanticism, his 
 own unique way of saying things, his own 
 peculiar conception of woman. In comparing 
 the hero of "The Fool Errant" with the heroes 
 of the three acknowledged masterpieces, it is 
 well to remember the attitudes the various 
 creators adopted toward their creations. 
 
 140
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 Cervantes began by poking fun at his Don 
 and ended by loving him. 
 
 Fielding began and ended by laughing at 
 his Joseph. 
 
 Beyle, the dry psychologist, throughout 
 maintained the tone of the scientific demon- 
 strator who aimed only at getting at the truth 
 without palliation and without suppression. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett, different from all of them, 
 begins and ends by loving his fool. He laughs 
 at him sometimes, but the tears are never far 
 away. 
 
 In some respects, it would be easy to com- 
 pare Mr. Hewlett with Beyle, whom he ad- 
 mires so enthusiastically. 
 
 Psychological phenomena absorbed the at- 
 tention of Beyle. It has been said that "as 
 the observant traveller, as the student of old 
 chronicles, as the author of novels and stories, 
 he was a psychologist and that alone." 
 
 This is becoming increasingly true of Mr. 
 Hewlett. He began by confining himself to 
 tale-telling. He has advanced in "Richard" 
 and "Queen's Quair" and in "The Fool Er- 
 rant" to the ranks of those authors who are 
 also engrossed with psychological phenome- 
 na. 
 
 141
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 With Beyle, there were two passions, the 
 love of war and th,e love of women. This is 
 true of Mr. Hewlett in his books. Both of 
 them love Italy and its women and its life 
 in the 15th and 16th centuries. 
 
 But there is also a contrast between the 
 greater man and this author. Beyle never 
 wrote a line of poetry and had no ear for 
 rhythm. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett not only writes poetry, 
 but approaches all his studies as does a poet 
 and in his methods of composition trusts, like 
 the poet, to that divine fury which is called 
 inspiration. Having stuffed himself full of 
 a subject, h,e then pours out his broodings and 
 imaginings. Beyle has the dry manner of the 
 Code Civile, the matter-of-fact manner of the 
 scientific investigator. Mr. Hewlett is carried 
 away on the wings of his imagination, his 
 style takes colour from its subject, sombre in 
 tragedy, lightsome in comedy. He appeals 
 both to the eye and th,e ear. Beyle appealed 
 to neither. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett is intensely personal in his at- 
 titude in his stories. Beyle is quite the re- 
 verse. 
 
 George Brandes says that Beyle's books 
 
 142
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 contain "the purely extrinsic Romanticism of 
 their day in the shape of disguises, poison- 
 ings, and assassinations, prison and flight 
 scenes, etc." 
 
 It was the memory of some of these ex- 
 ternals of romanticism, perhaps, that in- 
 fluenced Mr. Hewlett to employ similar epi- 
 sodes in "The Fool Errant." Indeed, substi- 
 tute "The Fool Errant" for "La Chartreuse" 
 and Mr. Hewlett can be allowed to describe 
 the Italy of his own book as well as that of 
 Beyle : 
 
 " 'La Chartreuse' depicts the Italy of the 
 18th century, the Italy of faded simulacra, of 
 fard and hair powder, of cicisbei and curled 
 abbati, of petits-maitres, of the Grand Dukes 
 of Tuscany, of Luca Longhi. For the come- 
 dian of manners this is the time of times, since 
 manners seemed all, and Italy the place of 
 places where manners h,ave always been more 
 than all. There was matter for a Moliere, 
 matter for a Hogarth (and Longhi took of 
 each) ; but there was something over. De 
 Stendhal bringing the wit of one and the irony 
 of th,e other up to be fed, brought also that 
 something over which neither of these had — • 
 dauntless appetite for romance, the arbitrary 
 
 H3
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 dealing — cet air de maitrise et ce beau non- 
 chaloir — of his own genius." 
 
 It is in this particular Italy that Hewlett 
 places a story that is at once a comedy of 
 manners, a picaresque romance, and a splen- 
 did study of character. It is a comedy of 
 manners in that it shows the complications 
 which grow out of the actions of the innocent 
 Englishman set in contact with a people 
 whpm he does not understand. It is picar- 
 esque in that it is an Odyssey of Strelley's 
 wandering from Padua to Rovigo, from Rovi- 
 go to Bologna, from Bologna to Pistoja, — in 
 fact throughout all the Tuscan lands that Mr. 
 Hewlett loves so well. It is a tale of an Odys- 
 sey through monasteries and hospitals and 
 prison houses, of picaresque adventures with 
 highwaymen, with thieving priests, with rag- 
 ged player-folk, with peasant girls. It is a 
 study of character because from the first to 
 the last the comedy and the adventures only 
 serve to throw into relief the mental growth 
 and development of him wh,o first viewed Italy 
 with the uncomprehending eyes of a child and 
 who wound up by understanding a great deal 
 and loving yet more. The book somewhat re- 
 calls "The Forest Lovers." Each is a tale of 
 
 144
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 chivalry, th,e one in an age of chivalry, the 
 other in a so-called age of reason. Mr. Hew- 
 lett has been peculiarly happy in his scheme. 
 To have set Strelley adrift in the England of 
 Pope and Swift, would have been to have lost 
 much. But you take this Francis, a lad of 21, 
 "eldest son and third child of Squire Antony 
 Strelley of Upcote, a Catholic, non-juring re- 
 cusant, stout old gentleman in Oxfordshire;" 
 give him plenty of money in his pocket and 
 books of poetry in his valise, make him good- 
 looking, good-tempered, with blue eyes and a 
 notable chin, make him too serious for laugh- 
 ter and too innocent for sin ; you take him and 
 turn him adrift in pagan Italy where he un- 
 derstands the people not at all and where they 
 at first totally fail to understand him and what 
 do you have? — sundry and exciting adven- 
 tures ; sundry love affairs in which he alone is 
 blind; troubles amany, and finally that peace 
 which comes with understanding. 
 
 At the beginning it is possible to say of 
 Strelley what Brandes has said of a some- 
 what similar character in German fiction : "He 
 is repeatedly saved from temptation simply by 
 his ignorance and inexperience. He never 
 realizes what is going on around him. Things 
 
 M5
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 happen to him without his doing any thing 
 to bring them about. He is the central figure 
 of a group of characters who all pursue call- 
 ings which leave them as free as he is him- 
 self." 
 
 It is only when he is no longer free, only 
 when he becomes involved in the lives of 
 those about him, that his eyes begin to open. 
 It is this which makes the author's concep- 
 tion so difficult. Strelley comes dangerously 
 near to being an impossible character. It is 
 one of Mr. Hewlett's achievements that he 
 does not allow Strelley to lapse into, a mere 
 burlesque figure. 
 
 This young dreamer, thinking no evil, has 
 always maintained that "women are as far 
 above our spiritual as they are fatally within 
 our material reach." When, therefore, he is 
 thrown into contact with, the pretty wife of 
 his host and guardian, Dr. Lanfranchi, he is 
 content to adore her. He seeks no farther and 
 gets nothing else. He keeps as holy relics 
 little trifles of hers — a h,air ribbon, perhaps, 
 a little worn slipper. For her sake he learns 
 Italian. He reads the Italian classics with her. 
 He is richly rewarded for his devotion when 
 he may kiss her hands. Finally, the innocent 
 
 146
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 tells her he loves her. To this Italian woman 
 to whom love means deep passion, he says 
 prettily: "I am at my prayers, in my church, 
 before my altar. Your eyes are the candles, 
 
 your heart is the altar stone. I kneel " 
 
 The exquisite irony of this situation is that 
 while hearing the poetical rhapsodies of Strel- 
 ley as he puts his Aurelia upon a throne and 
 worships her, the reader is also gradually and 
 slyly taken behind the scenes by the author. 
 He peeps into Aurelia's heart and sees her for 
 what she is, desirous and denied; provocative, 
 full of allure, and yet deemed a saint; a trick- 
 ster and yet held for betrayed; a passionate 
 Italian woman, bored to extinction by her 
 husband, and yet dreamed of as a loyal, loving 
 wife. It is only after many misadventures 
 and misunderstandings that it comes to Strel- 
 ley with a shock that his Aurelia is no 
 Beatrice ; that he has been held for a fool, in- 
 deed, and that he has behaved like a Galahad 
 where he was expected to act like a Lance- 
 lot. It comes to him like a plunge in icy 
 water to hear the dry Italian common sense of 
 another woman in commenting upon his ac- 
 tions: "If this is what comes of reading 
 your Dante, I advise the 'Song of Solomon.' 
 
 147
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 I have never opened the 'Divine Comedy' — 
 still less the 'Vita Nova;' but I consider th,e 
 author a donkey, and am sure that was the 
 opinion of his Donna Beatrice." 
 
 Now what is the beginnng of this folly? 
 Simply this, that on th,e night Strelley avowed 
 his boyish love for Aurelia, he remained too 
 late in her apartments and heard the formid- 
 able Lanfranchi coming up the stairs. In ut- 
 ter confusion he was hustled into a cup- 
 board, so that he could slip away afterwards 
 unheard and unseen. Now, while the saintly 
 Aurelia — embryonic Cleopatra — was wheedling 
 her husband into a good humour — it came 
 upon the fool in th,e cupboard that he had 
 wronged this lady by his avowal of love. 
 Ecco ! he would step out of the cupboard and 
 tell this half-appreciative husband that he is 
 wedded to th,e youngest of the angels. No 
 sooner conceived, than done! Here is room 
 for a pretty piece or comedy and Mr. Hew- 
 lett has lost none of his chances in the telling. 
 Galahad is kicked out by the angry professor. 
 Strelley with his body sore, but with his eyes 
 still close-shut to the truth, dreams of but 
 one quest in life, a foolish and quixotic quest, 
 to seek out Aurelia and restore her to her 
 
 148
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 lord. This quest of Aurelia takes him all over 
 Tuscany. He consorts with thieves and the 
 lowest of the low, without smutching his soul. 
 He peddles crucifixes. He falls in with the 
 formidable Fra Palamone, a vagrant and 
 criminal churchman. He joins the strolling 
 players. He sees the inside of prisons and 
 hospitals. Restored once of twice to the posi- 
 tion he could occupy by right, he lives for a 
 time in the great world of polish, and of 
 smiling corruption, of cynical noblemen and 
 their clever mistresses, only to disappear once 
 more and take up the humble work of car- 
 pentering in Lucca. Of course, in the end he 
 finds Aurelia and disillusion, but before that 
 he finds her who is to count finally for the 
 most and best in his life, — Virginia Strozzi, 
 a half-starved peasant girl. Now, amid all 
 these adventures, his character gradually takes 
 on true virility. He gradually acquires the 
 
 deeper wisdom. It is Virginia who teaches 
 
 him much, — the service that true love gives, 
 
 the pains it will endure, the sacrifices it will 
 
 make. Mr. Hewlett manages through Strel- 
 
 ley's wanderings not only to paint a picture 
 
 of 1 8th century Italy in its manifold aspects 
 
 149
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of high and low life, but how these things af- 
 fect Strelley himself. 
 
 Strelley differs from other Hewlett men in 
 that service women give him does not seem 
 the main thing in the world. For him there 
 is something more in existence than love ad- 
 ventures. He has a gallant conception of life 
 and of rules of conduct; religion to him is 
 something more than lip-service. With proud 
 humility he can say: 
 
 "I have been bare to the sh,irt and yet 
 proved my manhood, beaten like a thief and 
 yet maintained myself honest, scorned by men 
 and women and yet ready to serve my fellows, 
 held atheist by the godly and yet clung to my 
 Saviour's cross." 
 
 Virginia Strozzi is another of the typical 
 Hewlett women. Sh,e is beautiful. She is 
 content to serve her heart's lord. She is 
 meek, she is lowly, she is satisfied to endure 
 hunger for her lover's sake; to suffer disgrace 
 for him; nay, to sacrifice her very woman- 
 hood for h,im. 
 
 She is described as handsome in a fine, thin 
 way, but the author is not quite consistent in 
 his portrait, for later in the book when Vir- 
 ginia is gowned in borrowed finery, he tells 
 
 150
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 th,e reader that she looked the patrician with 
 her "refined beauty." Futhermore, he allows 
 her to quote poetry, and to speak of "pietisti- 
 cal aptitudes." Such things as these are not in 
 character. They produce a false note, the 
 more so as Virginia says to h.er lover: "I am 
 a little peasant and shall always be a little 
 peasant." This statement by her is true. 
 Where the author does not intrude, she has 
 the peasant common-sense and the peasant 
 hpnesty and loyalty. Nay, she even has a gift 
 of altruistic sacrifice of self which Mrs. Edith 
 Wharton avers is not characteristic of the 
 Latins. 
 
 The other important and dominant charac- 
 ter in the book is Fra Palamone. There are 
 some figures in the Hewlett novels that are 
 purely literary. They are drawn from books 
 rather than from life. There is a certain di- 
 abolical cleverness expended upon their crea- 
 tion but, however hard the author tries, the 
 reader is never quite sure they could have an 
 existence outside of romance. 
 
 Palamone is a figure in whom Stevenson 
 would have delighted. Palamone boasts: "I 
 am known all over Tuscany for the most 
 wheedling, good-natured, cunning, light-fin- 
 
 151
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 gered and light-hearted old devil of a Capu- 
 chin that ever hid in St Francis' wound * * * * 
 the waxing moon sees me skipping, and you 
 will no more keep me long off the road than 
 your cur upon it. I must be out and about 
 * * * * with a nose for every haughty 
 savour and an ear for every salted tale." 
 
 His wit is of the order of Chaucer's Pardon- 
 er. A peddler of relics, he pokes fun at his 
 trade. 
 
 This laughing, joking Capuchin can be grim 
 enough, sardonic enough, savage enough when 
 occasion requires. He will serve in any way 
 for gold. He will kidnap a lad whom the 
 authorities wish out of the way, or act as 
 pander to a nobleman's lust. He will be 
 blithe companion or tyrannical master; savage 
 opponent or skilful nurse. All in all, Mr. Hew- 
 lett's hand never drew a firmer, clearer pic- 
 ture of a remarkable character, but again — un- 
 gratefully — did Palamone ever exist, and if so 
 was it in 18th or in 15th century Italy? 
 
 On the whole, "The Fool Errant" is a 
 charming book, producing in bulk the impres- 
 sion that it is what it purports to be, — the 
 memoirs of Francis Strelley, written in the 
 1 8th century. 
 
 152
 
 THE FOOL ERRANT 
 
 Mrs. Edith Wharton holds that Mr. Hew- 
 lett's methods are too positive and too strenu- 
 ous for a novel dealing with the 18th century, 
 a century of nuances. 
 
 "Colours had paled," says she, "voices been 
 lowered, convictions subdued; in Italy es- 
 pecially, if one may trust the social records 
 of the day, people lived au jour le jour, 
 taking pain and pleasure lightly, and without 
 much sense of the moral issue." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett has shown people taking pain 
 and pleasure lightly, — Giraldi at his best, 
 Aurelia before she is thwarted, — but he has 
 also chosen to show that human beings are 
 very much alike in all ages when their strong 
 feelings are aroused. The mellow humour of 
 a Goldoni, the urbane elegance of an Alfieri 
 may determine the tone of a literature, but 
 they do not determine the expression of a pas- 
 sion. 
 
 153
 
 THE STOOPING LADY. 
 
 ALL of these novels possess in common at 
 least one characteristic, th,at of recall- 
 ing the writings of other authors. This 
 suggestiveness, however, is much stronger in 
 some classes than in others, Sometimes it is 
 a feature of style; often it is a similarity of 
 incident, or a likeness in character drawing; 
 now and then it is safe almost to say that a 
 certain personage could not have been created, 
 had it not been for the existence of some other 
 novelist's work; and occasionally striking 
 parallels of considerable length can be pointed 
 out between him and others." 
 
 This passage in a recent book concerning 
 George Meredith, might, with, slight modifica- 
 tions, be applied in certain cases to Mr. Hew- 
 lett. It has been pointed out in the course of 
 this study how Mr. Hewlett has time and 
 again challenged comparison with great names 
 in literature. So, in 1907, when "The Stooping 
 Lady" appeared, Mr. Hewlett was universally 
 called a Meredithian. 
 
 154
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 In certain surface ways there was undoubt- 
 edly a resemblance to the great man's work, 
 But after all, "The Stooping Lady," is the 
 output, not of a censor of his age, not of a 
 cynical satirist, not of a castigator of senti- 
 mentalism and of egotism, but of a poet and 
 romanticist to whom there is nothing so 
 beautiful in the world as the love of lovely 
 woman. 
 
 Is th,ere a complex story in "The Stooping 
 Lady," a plot with its devious interwindings 
 and complications, such as Thackeray and 
 Dickens and Meredith have given? Bared to 
 the bones, as it were, the novel is a series of 
 incidents : — Hermia Mary sees a butcher fight- 
 ing a pair of tipsy young lordlings ; she learns 
 th,at he is imprisoned for resenting the staking 
 of his horse ; she acts upon a quixotic impulse 
 and goes to his shop to apologize for the 
 wrongs her relatives have inflicted upon him; 
 she is wooed by violets sent by an unknown 
 giver, and falls in love with, him who conceived 
 the poetic thought; she meets her lover and 
 acknowledges him her lord; she hears him 
 speak at a reform meeting and is rescued by 
 him when a melee ensues ; she stands by his 
 side when he is put in the pillory for inciting 
 
 155
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 to riot and leaves just before a stray, — or is it 
 a purposed? — bullet kills her lover. 
 
 That is the bare, gleaming skeleton of the 
 story! It takes the true artist to clothe on 
 the outlines, th,e poet to give it colour and 
 beauty, the born creator to make it the vivid, 
 entrancing thing it is. The book is a far cry 
 from "Evan Harrington," with which it is so 
 often compared. Rose Jocelyn stooped to 
 Evan Harrington, just as Hermia Mary 
 sought to stoop to David Vernour. The one 
 gives the viewpoint of the aspiring tailor, the 
 other that of the stooping lady. "Evan Har- 
 rington," in all ruiman probability suggested 
 the theme of the later book, but they are dif- 
 ferent in purpose, different in treatment, and 
 different in effect. 
 
 Harrington is a satire from beginning to 
 end. Meredith, the fun-maker, Meredith the 
 castigator of human frailties, Meredith the 
 farceur, Meredith the cynical observer of life, 
 here allows himself to revel. The Countess 
 de Saldar, matched in English fiction only by 
 Becky Sharp, is pilloried for all to see and her 
 lies are exposed one after th,e other with ruth- 
 less skill. Harrington himself is pinned to a 
 card and allowed for a time to squirm. Read- 
 
 156
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 ers are cynically shown that humans are all 
 very much alike under the skin, — gentlemen 
 are often innately vulgar; vulgarians are 
 often gentlemanly. If Meredith displays him- 
 self the social satirist, Mr. Hewlett places 
 himself on record as the ardent republican, as 
 th.e man who scorns social caste. 
 
 How poor a thing is Harrington when com- 
 pared with Vernour! Harrington would be a 
 gentleman. Vernour proclaims himself a man. 
 Harrington grows through his contact with 
 the nobility of Rose. Vernour is full grown, 
 but displays his best side when there is a call 
 for it in the wooing of Hermia. Rose, agreeable 
 figure that she is, does not win love as does 
 the Hewlett heroine. Rose scorns tradesmen. 
 She sneers at them. Only by degrees does 
 she accustom herself to the fact that Harring- 
 ton is not born a gentleman. She is ready to 
 believe base things of him, attributing them 
 
 to his blood. She is ready to marry some one 
 
 else when her family urge the advantages of 
 
 position and wealth. 
 
 Not so with Hermia Mary, hot little rebel 
 
 by reason of her Irish father and the pretty 
 
 mother wh,o broke with her family to elope 
 
 157
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 over the garden wall with her lover. No 
 sneers at tradesmen come from Hermia's lips ! 
 
 "He's the butcher, miss." 
 
 "Oh then that was he — that young man — " 
 
 "Yes, miss." 
 
 "And who were the other two, the two 
 cowards attacking him?" 
 
 It is intimated that they were gentlemen 
 and were drunk, something to be taken into 
 consideration. * 
 
 "Pooh!" answers Hermia. She is not afraid 
 of the people, nor does she scorn them. She 
 speaks of her fellow passengers on a coach to 
 London from the north and as one who knows 
 them well. This girl is the elemental woman, 
 passionate, essentially feminine, true as steel 
 to the man she loves,, knowing no social bar- 
 riers and no qualms. She stands ready with- 
 out question to give up for her chosen lover 
 everything woman holds dear; nay, she does 
 give up her dear-held pride. She endures for 
 Vernour; she suffers with him. 
 
 The canvasses are different in the two books 
 also. "Harrington" has many figures. There 
 are John Raikes, the Cogglesby brothers and 
 the Great Mel himself to recall Dickens and 
 his methods. There are also a host of minor 
 
 158
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 characters. On the contrary, the vital figures 
 in "The Stooping Lady" are comparatively 
 few. It was not without reason that an En- 
 glish reviewer suggested that the book might 
 well have been called "Lady Morfa." The tale, 
 such as it is, deals with the loves of Hermia 
 Mary and Vernour, but the figures revolve 
 around the impressive one of the old dowager, 
 a perfect character, sister to those in the pages 
 of Thackeray. 
 
 "The Stooping Lady" is rich with many 
 things Mr. Hewlett has taught himself. Mod- 
 ern though the style of it may be, compara- 
 tively free from the mannerisms that appealed 
 to the artist in him, it yet abounds in the 
 best things he has always given, — beauty of 
 phrasing, nimbleness of wit, delightful dialogue, 
 and care in character drawing. With the wis- 
 dom that has always marked his work, he has 
 chosen a period rich in colour, 1809 — when 
 national consciousness and class consciousness 
 were both at their highest point in England; 
 when Napoleon was still something more than 
 a bogey to good Englishmen, when a great 
 deal was being heard about the rights of fran- 
 chise and the rights of man. 
 
 This stir in the souls of men is deftly in- 
 
 159
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 dicated. There are hints of the growling of 
 Hazlitt. Cobbett appears and there are imag- 
 inary quotations from him. A glimpse is 
 caught of Parson Tooke, that "hoary old spi- 
 der." There are faint echoes of the battles 
 between Whigs and Tories. 
 
 It is precisely at this time, when men are 
 most passionately alive to the questions of 
 caste and human rights, that Hermia Mary 
 Chambre of the house of Caryll, Lady Morfa, 
 her grandmother, and David Vernour play 
 out their little drama of human love and sorrow 
 and suffering. 
 
 And first as to Hermia herself. With what 
 a sure touch and with what perfect ear for 
 music, by the way, Mr. Hewlett christened 
 her. Hermia Mary ! Hermia Mary ! the read- 
 er rolls the sweet syllables on the tongue, 
 just as did her lover. And what infinite pains 
 Mr. Hewlett has taken to make her credible, 
 to make her alluring to the reader. The nov- 
 elist himself in his own proper person des- 
 cribes her; then as Vernour saw her and 
 Captain Ranald, Lord Rodono and Lord Sand- 
 gate, — lovers all. Then from another angle 
 there are glimpses of her in the diaries of Mer- 
 vyn Touchett and the gossip of Pink Mor- 
 
 160
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 daunt. Lastly she is seen in her own conver- 
 sation and in those letters which drip with 
 her personality, her fun, her wit, her deep 
 feeling. Her bright, brave spirit when it is 
 moved to action, her nobility of soul when she 
 is touched, move the author to poetry. Noth- 
 ing less than poetry will suffice her admirers 
 in describing her. Even Pink Mordaunt, club 
 gossip, is touched by her girlish gallantry. It 
 is necessary thus to expend treasure of words 
 upon her creation. Otherwise the story 
 would have lacked convincement. It needed 
 all the preliminary groundwork to prepare for 
 the essential poesy of that romantic garden 
 scene in which she "seals her indentures." It 
 needed all the persuasive powers of the author 
 to make his readers forget the butcher in her 
 lover. 
 
 She is endowed with beauty, with the hot 
 colouring and the dark eyes of her father, 
 with the dark tresses of her mother's race. 
 Each of her lovers sees something of her 
 physical charm. "She's got eyes like a mid- 
 summer eve — eyes with fires dancing in 'em — 
 eyes alight," exclaims one. 
 
 She has, too, a pretty and uncommon wit. 
 
 The author is not content with saying that
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 she possesses this gift. He gives proof of it. 
 Her early happy letters abound in it. She is 
 met by a row of flunkies at her grandmother's 
 home: "A giant to each door, and a row of 
 white-headed, flaming-breeched giants in the 
 gallery; a groom of the chambers to herald 
 any silly errand to grandmamma — vexatious, 
 Mary ! I feel like a parcel from the country — 
 fresh butter, perhaps, — handed about from 
 man to man, from coach to coach and de- 
 livered at last, greasy and thumbed, to my 
 purchaser." 
 
 Or„ again, on the eternal and absorbing 
 question of clothes, telling of what she saw at 
 a rout: 
 
 "My sweet cousin, you never saw such 
 gowns, or such absence of gowns — literally 
 abandoned! Mrs. Fancourt was there, like 
 Venus rising from the sea — happily some- 
 where near the waist line she thought better 
 of it and the rest remained under muslin." 
 
 But beauty can be shallow and wit can be 
 heartless. This girl is neither shallow nor 
 heartless. She is noble, — noble in the better 
 meaning of the word, not in the vapid sense 
 employed by the aristocrats by whom she is 
 surrounded. 
 
 162
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 This is what is to be expected from a girl 
 so deeply and reverently in love with a father 
 who spoke to her thus wisely: "I see you a 
 woman grown, my child; I see you a lover. 
 Manhood — womanhood — and the call of the 
 heart between; you will never be false to 
 that. Love worthily, love well, love the best. 
 Love truth, love justice, my Hermia Mary; 
 hate like the devil those three children of 
 his — Cant, False Privilege, and Treachery to 
 the Truth that is in you." And again: "If 
 you stoop, Hermy, stoop nobly." 
 
 When the time came, despite the creed of 
 her caste, despite the protests of her family, 
 despite precedent, she knew her own heart, 
 she knew what she had to give and what she 
 chose her butcher hero to take. There was no 
 faltering. She summed herself and her story 
 up in her own beautiful words: "Either one 
 loves or one doesn't; either one is loved, or 
 is not. And if one is loved in so beautiful a 
 way that must mean the lover is noble. And 
 if one loves — even if one loves an impossible 
 person, as you say — if one loves with all one's 
 heart, and is grateful, and is humble — there 
 can be no harm. At least, I can see none." 
 
 Such is Hermia Mary, a greater than the 
 
 163
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 fair Jehane, because her conduct is more ex- 
 plicable and more convincing; in some ways 
 a greater than Queen Mary, because she is 
 entirely the author's own, with no ground- 
 work of history on which to build. 
 
 Over against Hermia's character, the 
 author has set that of Lady Morfa, a masterly 
 portrait in a different style. Old where Her- 
 mia is young, a defender of caste where Her- 
 mia wishes to break down the barriers, she 
 is brought into collision with the girl through- 
 out the book. How 1 like a Thackerayan dowa- 
 ger she is: "In person she was thin, not tall, 
 and very much like an eagle, with a nose 
 sharp, bony and prominent, with eyes black, 
 hard, and deeply set, which were capable of 
 an unswerving, unblinking and rather terrible 
 scrutiny of persons and things. She could 
 blink them too, bitterly when she chose; and 
 her lips, which were thin, had a way of twitch- 
 ing very elfin to behold. Lastly, she stooped 
 to a crutch, called you 'My Dear,' said ex- 
 actly what she pleased, never concealed her 
 opinions, and was absolutely candid as to her 
 tastes, which were coarse, v and her labhor- 
 rences, which were three. I have mentioned 
 
 164
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 them before: enthusiasm, slackness of fibre 
 and treachery to Family." 
 
 Such was this great Whig lady, "a Whig of 
 the Whigs, dotting all the i's in the sacred 
 words British Constitution." 
 
 No wonder she divided mankind, for all 
 purposes, into two classes: — "Either you were 
 Family, or you were a person." 
 
 It is hardly necessary to consider the other 
 characters in the book. The author expended 
 his best powers upon the two women. Per- 
 fectly capable of painting a large canvass, 
 with crowds of figures, he has here contented 
 himself with the portraits of the heroine and 
 her grandmother. Even the hero of the book 
 is shadowy compared with what Mr. Hewlett 
 could have done with the part had he desired. 
 But it is precisely here that the author exer- 
 cises an exceedingly clever trick in his artistry. 
 Vernour wins Hermia Mary because to her 
 he remains a more or less intangible, semi- 
 mysterious figure, invested with a certain 
 glamour.- Vernour, with just the right in- 
 stinct, leaves himself very largely to the im- 
 agination. So, too, Mr. Hewlett leaves the 
 butcher very largely to the reader's imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 165
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 The reader is placed in the same category 
 with Hermia Mary. He is forced to see Ver- 
 nour very much as she did. By so doing, the 
 love story becomes credible. 
 
 He understands the magic that worked upon 
 the high-spirited girl. Only, having allowed 
 it to work, Mr. Hewlett was not true to him- 
 self, not true to life^ and not honest with his 
 readers. There is really no excuse for the 
 killing of Vernour, save the author's desire to 
 get rid of him. His death did not spring from 
 the necessities of the story. What one master 
 of fiction wrote to another, is applicable here. 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, writing on Novem- 
 ber i, 1892 to Mr. J. M. Barrie penned, these 
 wise words: 
 
 "If you are going to make a book end badly, 
 it must end badly from the beginning. Now, 
 your book began to end well. You let your- 
 self fall in love with, and fondle, and smile at 
 your puppets. Once you had done that, your 
 honour was committed — at the cost of truth 
 to life you were bound to save them. It 
 is the blot on 'Richard Feverel,"for instance, 
 that it begins to end well ; and then tricks you 
 and ends ill. But in this case, there is worse 
 behind, for the ill ending does not inherently 
 
 166
 
 THE STOOPING LADY 
 
 issue from the plot — the story had, in fact, 
 ended well after the great last interview be- 
 tween Richard and Lucy, — and the blind, il- 
 logical bullet which smashes all, has no more 
 to do between the boards than a fly has to do 
 with a room into whose open window it 
 comes buzzing. It might have so happened; 
 it needed not; and unless needs must, we have 
 no right to pain our readers." 
 
 "The Stooping Lady" had ended well after 
 that last great scene where Hermia Mary 
 stood beside her lover who was fastened in 
 the pillory; she thus proclaimed to all the 
 world how her heart stood. The bullet which 
 killed Vernour was quite as blind and illogical 
 as the one which Stevenson denounced. 
 
 Commenting upon this book, its author once 
 said: "It is good writing, but it is not good 
 novel writing." Mr. Hewlett himself, to the 
 contrary, and despite its ending, this novel 
 is an entrancing little book concerning one of 
 the most radiant girls in latter-day fiction. 
 
 167
 
 THE SPANISH JADE. 
 
 IN the spring of 1908 there appeared a 
 little volume — somewhat over the protest 
 of its author, which might have been writ- 
 ten ten years ago so far as its manner was 
 concerned. It was thoroughly romantic and 
 dealt with Spain,, as formerly its author had 
 dealt with Italy. In fact, it was a veritable 
 "Little Novel of Spain.". Going back in time 
 no later than i860, it embodied its author's 
 ideas of what Spain means, that "great, roomy, 
 haggard country, half desert waste and half 
 bare rocks * * * immemorially old, immutably 
 the same, splendidly frank, acquainted with 
 grief and sin; like some brown gipsy wench 
 of the way-side, with throat and half her 
 bosom bare, who would laugh and show her 
 teeth, and be free with her jest; but if you 
 touched her honour, ignorant that she had one, 
 would stab you without ruth and go her free 
 way leaving you carrion in the ditch." 
 
 This novelette gives the essence of all that 
 he has seen in Spain, read in its literature, 
 
 168
 
 THE SPANISH JADE 
 
 perceived in its people, dreamed of its spirit. 
 Just as brief trips in Italy gave him a firm 
 grasp of the atmosphere of that country, so 
 short vacation journeys in Spain gave him 
 an insight into the temperament of the never- 
 changing Iberian race. Just as he studied the 
 plastic arts of Italy, so he studied the fine 
 arts of Spain. Just as everywhere in Italy he 
 took with him his Dante as guide, mentor and 
 spiritual friend, so in Spain he took with him 
 his Cervantes. He loves "Don Quixote," is 
 full of it, quotes it. This book evidently in- 
 spired his travel to its scenes; evidently sug- 
 gested the writing of a Spanish tale. It sup- 
 plied him with one of the happiest touches in 
 "The Spanish Jade." 
 
 " T have here,' says his hero to the customs 
 officer upon entering the town of Palencia, 'a 
 shirt and a comb, the New Testament, the 
 History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don 
 Quixote de la Mancha, and a tooth brush.' 
 Much of this was Greek to the doganero, who, 
 however, understood that the stranger was 
 referring in tolerable Castilian to a provincial 
 gentleman of degree." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett's little novel appeared from the 
 presses about the same time as Mr. Havelock 
 
 169
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Ellis' large volume, "The Soul of Spain." 
 The reader finds quite as much of the soul of 
 Spain in the one as in the other. In a way, 
 it almost seemed as if the story were a com- 
 plement to the more serious and more critical 
 book. Almost everything that such a trained 
 observer, traveler and critic as Mr. Ellis finds 
 to say about Spain is also incorporated in the 
 Hewlett book. What Mr. Ellis says about 
 Spanish women is proved by Manuela; what 
 he says about Spanish stoicism, the story 
 bears out. Mr. Ellis calls attention to the 
 fact that Spain is not another Italy, neither 
 in its people, its scenery nor in its art and 
 literature. He dwells upon the essential fixity 
 of the Spanish character, upon the differences 
 between the Catalans and the Aragonese, as 
 if they were different peoples. Mr. Hewlett 
 speaks of "the Spains and the nations which 
 people them." Then he adds, carrying out 
 the very thought of Mr. Ellis: "Behold the 
 Castilian, the Valencian, the Murcian on his 
 glebe, you find an exact relation established, 
 the one exhales the other. The man is what 
 his country is, tragic, hagridden, yet impas- 
 sive, patient under the sun. He stands for the 
 natural verities. You cannot change him, 
 
 170
 
 THE SPANISH JADE 
 
 move, nor hurt him. He can earn neither your 
 praises nor your reproach. As well might 
 you blame the staring noon of summer or 
 throw a kind word to the everlasting hills. 
 The bleak pride of the Castillano, the flint and 
 steel of Aragon, the languor which veils its 
 Andalusian fire — travelling the lands which 
 gave them birth, you find them scored in 
 large over mountain and plain and river-bed, 
 and bitten deep into the hearts of the in- 
 dwellers. They are as seasonable there as the 
 flowers of waste places, and will charm you as 
 much." 
 
 "The Spanish Jade" is touched and con- 
 trolled somewhat by the spirit and traditions 
 of Spanish literature. Even as in his ro- 
 mances of old time, Mr. Hewlett followed 
 Chaucer and William Morris in their fond- 
 ness for heroines with grey eyes, so in the 
 present Spanish novelette, he has a heroine 
 whose physical characteristics are those of the 
 women of Spain's great books. She is a girl 
 with tawny hair and sea-green eyes, this be- 
 ing the type that has always appealed to 
 Spanish writers as the most beautiful and 
 most aristocratic. But Mr. Hewlett has neith- 
 er slavishly copied Spanish literature, nor 
 
 171
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 the popular type seen in the "Carmen" of 
 Merimee and Bizet. It is true there is in this 
 story a girl who is part gipsy, even as Carmen 
 is, but in some ways she is more the real 
 thing, her deeds seem more probable. Manu- 
 ela is not solely a seductive beauty with a wild 
 reckless heart filled with lustful passion, and 
 with murderous hate when denied what she 
 desires. Mr. Hewlett has not created an- 
 other Carmen. He loves women. Loving, he 
 also pities. It is not in his heart to depict 
 any woman without some redeeming touches, 
 without something that shows they are not 
 entirely bad. In many ways this poor Manu- 
 ela is a Spanish and unhappier Isoult la Des- 
 irous. Isoult went through troubles amany 
 in a forest world of medieval times. She was 
 surrounded on all sides by lustful men thirst- 
 ing for her beauty. However, she was fortun- 
 ate enough to be preserved from the fate these 
 beasts of the chase willed for her. This was 
 not so in the case of this Spanish Isoult, who, 
 it is true, was of base birth where the heroine 
 of "The Forest Lovers" was revealed in the 
 end as a Countess. This girl of Spain in the 
 sixties had never had a chance in life. She 
 had never known a good human being. Mother, 
 
 172
 
 THE SPANISH JADE 
 
 unfrocked priest, wandering student, — all were 
 evil and all saw in her only a pretty piece of 
 merchandise, And Manuela was so well 
 worth saving! She was so grateful for the 
 small favour of an honest kiss and a wholesome 
 word. She was so touched by a glimpse of 
 a world where girls can remain clean. She 
 was heroic with the proud heroism of her race. 
 Loving Manvers for whose sake she com- 
 mitted murder, ready to be as wax in his 
 hands, she must needs be honest with him and 
 with herself; she must needs stand up in court 
 and willingly say things about herself which 
 she knows must reveal to him all of her piti- 
 ful, wretched story. It is not so much her 
 beauty as her proud humility that wins for 
 her the sympathy of the reader. 
 
 Some of the other characters are direct 
 descendants of forebears in Spanish literature. 
 There is Esteban Vincaz, the villain of the 
 piece, a true picaresque character, a criminal 
 and bully, with "the look of a seraph when he 
 sang." Don Louis Ramonez de Alavia is also 
 a familiar figure. He is, of course, thin, hol- 
 low-eyed and sallow; he is first cousin to the 
 Archbishop of Toledo, is entitled to wear his 
 hat in the presence of the Queen, — and lives 
 
 173
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 upon five pence a day ! But the last of the im- 
 portant characters in the book is the author's 
 own. Gil Perez, the hero's valet, speaks in 
 dialect, a perilous undertaking for the author. 
 The effort, on the whole, is successful. 
 
 The droll Spanish-English serves to bring 
 out the fun of the character. Mr. Ellis says 
 that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza still re- 
 main all there is of Spain. He says one can 
 see the Quixotes and the Panzas on every 
 high-road. If Don Luis has some of the at- 
 tributes of the immortal Don, Gil is a blend 
 of both characteristics. In serving his master 
 he is as matter of fact, as literal, as faithful as 
 ever Sancho was. In his wooing of Manuela, 
 in the poetry it stirs up in his heart, he is 
 kinsman of Quixote. He takes the foreground 
 in the novel along with the "Jade" herself. 
 It is he who provides for Manvers; he who 
 finds Manuela when she has sought to disap- 
 pear; he who loves her; he who saves Man- 
 vers' life and who provides for Manuela's 
 future. 
 
 Osmund Manvers, the Englishman, who 
 sets himself atilt against Spanish ways, is a 
 stage Englishman. The author comments on 
 his clean shirt, his extra change of linen, his 
 
 174
 
 THE SPANISH JADE 
 
 books ,but the truest touch is conveyed in a 
 sentence. It is the very essence of the chiv- 
 alry of the Protestant Englishman in Catholic 
 Spain where woman is often considered a 
 baggage and where parades in honor of the 
 Virgin are so frequent. Manvers sees a band 
 of ruffians abuse Manuela and there breaks 
 from him this exclamation : "Damn him! I've 
 a mind . . And they pray to a woman!" 
 
 Notwithstanding this sign of real life, Man- 
 vers is somewhat wooden. He is too stolid. 
 Caught up in a net of circumstances by his 
 chance meeting with Manuela and twice saved 
 by her from the assassin's bullet, he is blind 
 to the love she bears him, bestows her upon 
 Gil and goes his thoughtless way to England 
 and its more prosaic life. Briefly and baldly 
 outlined the story seems highly melodramatic 
 and also tenuous. Told by Mr. Hewlett, it 
 is an absorbing narrative giving the heady es- 
 sence of all that is romantic and poetical, as 
 well as savage and cruel, in Spain. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Symons gave it as his opinion 
 that "Carmen" was the most Spanish thing 
 since "Gil Bias." It is a strong temptation to 
 add that the story of Manuela is the most 
 Spanish thing since "Carmen." 
 
 175
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE. 
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE," which appeared 
 in 1908, was a complete surprise to 
 those friends of Mr. Hewlett to whom 
 he had intimated that the novel was to be 
 completly modern, completely different and 
 completely shorn of all those things which 
 have hitherto been put down as Hewlettian. 
 In a way, it was his complete answer to the 
 oft-repeated assertion that he could not pre- 
 sent the life of people of today and that he 
 could not work without the extraneous inter- 
 est given a book by dint of casting its scenes 
 in faraway eras and places. "Halfway House" 
 was a surprise, not only because it dealt en- 
 tirely with the England of the present time, 
 but also because of its method. It is a light- 
 hearted comedy all through, — albeit touched 
 with the shimmer and glamour of romance, 
 inevitable in a Hewlett book. Its people deal 
 with the problems of today; they talk the 
 speech of today; they are essentially modern. 
 
 176
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE 
 
 As a matter of course, many reviewers 
 pigeon-holed the book in its class and so 
 breathed easier. They adjudged that Hewlett 
 was now a confirmed Meredithian, that he had 
 elected to follow the traditions fixed by the 
 wizard of Box Hill, had chosen Meredithian 
 themes and played with them in Meredithian 
 manner. 
 
 Now that is not quite true. If to look upon 
 life with smiling eyes; to tell stories with wit 
 and humour; to garnish their telling with a 
 style that has tricks and graces of its own be 
 Meredithian, then is Mr. Hewlett a follower 
 of the master so recently dead. But there are 
 other things to be considered. Mr. Hewlett's 
 style is not so dazzling and elliptical that it 
 obscures, as so often happens in Meredith's 
 novels. Futhermore, his characters do not 
 constantly scintillate with wit and epigram 
 any more than persons do in real life ; and still 
 furthermore, while Meredith's comedies, like 
 Dickens' novels, are constantly freighted with 
 some serious study of some grave problem of 
 the day, Mr. Hewlett's two so-called Meredith- 
 ian books,— "The Stooping Lady" and "Half- 
 way House," — have been stories pure and 
 simple. No great life problem has been at- 
 
 177
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 • 
 
 tacked ; no thesis of philosophy expounded. If 
 there is any moral in the two books it is: 
 "Don't seek to stoop to the person you love; 
 don't seek to step out of your class; that way 
 sorrow lies." 
 
 And Mr. Hewlett seems to enforce this 
 moral, although in the two books he rather 
 displays himself a radical who cares little for 
 caste and has little sympathy with its preju- 
 dices. If he injects his own personality into 
 the books at all, it is to sympathize with 
 Hermia Mary for her fearless course in her 
 love episode, and with Mary Middleham for 
 the trials she had to face in the new circle 
 of society to which her aristocratic husband 
 introduced her. 
 
 But to go into these things is to take the 
 book too seriously. 
 
 "Halfway House," should be considered 
 purely as a book of comedy; a comedy in 
 which Blackheath manners, morals, and ways 
 of looking at life are contrasted with those of 
 Mayfair; a comedy in which there is that 
 funny scene where an aristocratic old lady 
 condescends, only to be snubbed by a resident 
 in Suburbia; a comedy in which life is seen 
 as a play in which ridiculous, fortuitous 
 
 178
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE 
 
 chances and accidents change and colour the 
 whole of existence, making for happiness or the 
 reverse ; a comedy in which all little strivings 
 and bickerings are food for ironic laughter, 
 and in which humans appear to the eye of the 
 beholder as dolls dressed up and smirking. 
 
 The main theme of the story is not new. 
 Mr. Hewlett has not been prodigal in his in- 
 vention. The plot has been often used. 
 Whatever value it has is that it is presented 
 from the Hewlettian standpoint. It is the in- 
 dividual touches he has put into it that count. 
 The theme may best be happily and poetically 
 indicated by this quotation which illustrates 
 the dream of John Germain, a gentleman of 
 fine landed estates in Berks. Here is how the 
 man of fifty thinks of the maid of 24: 
 
 "The nymph Mero, let us say, was sought 
 by the God Sylvanus, who wooed her in a 
 well-watered vale. Or a young shepherdess 
 — call her Marina — was the dear desire of 
 Cratylus the mature, who offered her with 
 touching diffidence, the well-found hearth, the 
 stored garners, the cellar, for whose ripe an- 
 tiquity (alas !) he himself could vouch. The 
 maid was not cold; it was himself who 
 doubted whether he were not frigid. He be- 
 
 173
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 sought her not to despise his silvering beard, 
 the furrow in his brow. Boys, urged he, are 
 hot and prone; but the wood-fire leaps and 
 dies, while the steady glow of the well- pressed 
 peats endures until the morning, and a little 
 breath revives all its force. Thus Cratylus 
 to Marina in his heart." 
 
 There was no grand passion here. There 
 could not be. It was always a middle-aged 
 man's dream of a home with its ruddy fire, its 
 mistress with welcoming arms, its long, studi- 
 ous evenings. Having accomplished one kind 
 of tale in "The Stooping Lady," there is here 
 the reverse in the story of the stooping 
 gentleman, of the middle-aged Cratylus who 
 loves — after a fashion — and wins — after a 
 fashion — his young Marina all dizzy with the 
 honour conferred upon Blackheath by May- 
 fair, grateful for it, touched, able to give 
 everything in return but the one thing needful, 
 — Love! In "The Stooping Lady" the author 
 resorted to the ancient expedient of killing 
 the hero because he did not have the courage 
 to allow his heroine to make the final stoop. 
 
 In "Halfway House" the stoop is ac- 
 complished. John Germain is always con- 
 scious of it, revels in it, takes an aesthetic de- 
 
 180
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE 
 
 light in the beautiful picture of the modern 
 King Cophetua and his beggar maid. His 
 first wife had been of his own class, one very 
 conscious of her beauty, seeking her pleasures 
 where she might find them. When threatened 
 by the disgrace of common scandal, the young 
 Germain put on his mask to conceal his feel- 
 ings, lived the man in the case out of England, 
 faced every sorrow his wife might bring him, 
 until death came to her as a blessed release to 
 him. This kind of experience embittered him. 
 He did not trust the women of his caste. So 
 in time the now middle-aged poet came to 
 dream of one who would some day sit beside 
 his hearth, indebted to him for everything, 
 grateful to him for everything. When he saw 
 Mary Middleham, Mary of the hunted eyes, 
 Mary in simple gown, he was convinced that 
 here was the one destined to be the comfort 
 of his declining years. He did not see that 
 his love was a matter of intellectual choice ; 
 did not realize that his kisses lacked fire; did 
 not understand how shocking it was to a 
 young bride on her wedding day to have her 
 husband discourse of long hours when she 
 would go to school to him and learn French 
 and Italian. In other words, the tragi-comedy 
 
 181
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of John Germain's case was that he did not 
 realize his incapacity for love. In his vision, 
 the beggar maid remained always loyal and 
 grateful to Cophetua. He did not foresee that 
 in real life the things money could bestow 
 upon Mary would soon be taken as a matter 
 of course; that after a time she would not be 
 so self conscious about the coronet of position 
 he had placed upon her pretty head. And 
 then what? Mary, become used to her new 
 station, — by dint of her woman's adaptability 
 and quick wit, — looks for more. 
 
 And the dream is done ! Cophetua, now old 
 before his time, sinks back into the comic- 
 pathetic position of father to his wife. But 
 not entirely. He has not the father's mag- 
 nanimity. Rather, he has the husband's 
 jealousy. Germain is a gentleman with a 
 gentleman's fine instincts, but one corner of 
 his brain has been warped by his earlier mat- 
 rimonial experience. Long suffering and pain 
 have made him dread a repetition of the buried 
 past. Simple little actions on the part of his 
 Mary, which if explained might have been 
 smiled generously out of court, seem momen- 
 tous to him; simple flirtations, due more to 
 ignorance than design, cause fears in Mary 
 
 182
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE 
 
 which he misinterprets. He buries his sus- 
 picions and his trouble deep within his breast ; 
 he assumes once more his coat of armour be- 
 hind which to hide; but he never forgets, the 
 result being that Turk-like, after death, he 
 seeks to keep a chain upon his property — his 
 wife — making an ungenerous will with cad- 
 dish clauses in it that make his world stick 
 tongue in check and leer with ironic eyes. 
 And yet, John Germain was not a bad man. 
 He was a good man as men go. In that high 
 comedy, called life, his career and his nature 
 had been twisted and distorted by fortuitous 
 circumstances, — a pretty confession left un- 
 made, a foolish telegram left undestroyed, a 
 husbandly caress left unbestowed. 
 
 In the ordinary novel when man and wife 
 are unhappy, there is the inevitable third per- 
 son to make the inevitable triangle. This story 
 has two such men, Duplessis, already men- 
 tioned, and John Senhouse. The novel's 
 weakest point is Hewlett's handling of Duples- 
 sis. He does not convince the reader that so 
 caddish a fellow could wield such an influence 
 over Mary Germain. The ex-nursery govern- 
 ess had held her own with the best and most 
 spiteful society of the county. It is therefore 
 
 183
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 hard to believe that Duplessis, by his inso- 
 lence, could always make her feel her Black- 
 heath origin, could take her into his arms and 
 kiss her without as much as by-your-leave. 
 The Mary who had grown in spiritual insight, 
 would have left far behind the ungentlemanly 
 gentleman of her early surreptitious flirta- 
 tions. 
 
 Senhouse, who appeals at once to her heart 
 and her mind, to her emotions and her imag- 
 ination, wins the reader, too. Imagine a man 
 who looks something like Robert Louis Stev- 
 enson, who wanders in strange lands and in 
 his own England something after the manner 
 of George Borrow, and who preaches epi- 
 gramatic doctrine something like Mr. G. B. 
 Shaw and you have Senhouse. A Cambridge 
 scholar, who for the most part foregoes the 
 society of the learned; a rich man's son, who 
 scorns wealth and position; a painter and 
 writer, who often lives on what he earns as 
 a tinker; a gentleman vagabond, who scorns 
 caste, and carries his belongings in a little 
 cart; an enthusiastic botanist, who takes the 
 tight little island as his garden; a real man, 
 who is always a gentleman, Senhouse is the 
 most fascinating character in the book, akin 
 
 184
 
 HALFWAY HOUSE 
 
 somewhat to Mr. W. J. Locke's Paragot, but 
 delightful and original nevertheless. He fas- 
 cinates because the author has left things un- 
 told. As Mr. Hewlett once pointed out in con- 
 sidering Stendhal, it is precisely the things left 
 out that appeal to the imagination. It is Sen- 
 house who is Mary's good friend; it is he 
 whose quiet talks compel her to be frank with 
 her husband and to face the overweening 
 Duplessis with something of courage; it is 
 he, who in the final chapter of the book makes 
 her come to him shyly and blushing, as meek 
 virgin choosing the master whom she will 
 gladly serve. For Mary is still the maid seek- 
 ing a master. She will be humble when she 
 finds him, clay for the potter's hands, to be 
 moulded into what he will. 
 
 The development of her character, from the 
 girlish dweller in Suburbia, casting down shy 
 eyes before her "betters," to resident in May- 
 fair holding her own with the best of them, is 
 cleverly demonstrated. Once the emptiness 
 of the show is realized by her, she longs for 
 freedom and the open sky, flowers and sun and 
 rain, for the good companionship and the warm 
 love of a true man, for the essentials of life 
 rather than its superficialities and its luxuries. 
 
 185
 
 MAURiqE HEWLETT 
 
 She is willing, if she can find these things 
 there, even to occupy a tent in Vagabondia. 
 
 It is at this point that the novel ends, with 
 Senhouse calling and with Mary answering. 
 
 "Halfway House" is not a big novel in the 
 sense that some of the great vital problems of 
 modern life are illustrated and discussed. It 
 is what it claims to bey — a "comedy of de- 
 grees." It is significant in its author's career 
 because in many ways it seems to be the half- 
 way house in his work. From this house, 
 looking backward, the student can see the suc- 
 cession of romantic novels to his credit; the 
 books in which he reverted to a past that 
 lent itself to the purposes of the confirmed 
 romanticist; the books which caused him to 
 be described as a writer who opened a window, 
 as it were, into the Renaissance era and allowed 
 men to look through and see its great figures 
 in the flesh — real breathing men and women, 
 laughing and sorrowing, fighting and loving, 
 brought to life by a magic of his own. 
 
 From this house, looking forward, the student 
 — judging by the author's latest work — may 
 only guess that Mr. Hewlett has done with the 
 past and is going to concern himself hence- 
 forth with men and women of his own period. 
 
 186
 
 OPEN COUNTRY. 
 THE RUINOUS FACE. 
 
 BACK of the stories Hewlett has invented, 
 back of the style in which he has related 
 them, there has always been that in- 
 definable thing called 'personality." His books 
 have been marked with an individual tang 
 that belonged to him and to no other. In 
 "Open Country" he quite frankly revels in his 
 own ideas, in his own love for beautiful words 
 and high sentiments. The book is not so 
 much a novel as a spiritual autobiography. 
 It is primarily a book of the spirit, — fictionally 
 that of John Maxwell Senhouse the hero; actu- 
 ally that of Hewlett, the creator. He reveals 
 himself as an individualist studying the prob- 
 lems and feeling himself in opposition to 
 many of the beliefs of a complicated modern 
 society. 
 
 He is found inserting the probe into insti- 
 tutions and establishments, and always in the 
 true comic spirit. He is seen dropping the 
 acid of a more or less subtle criticism upon the 
 
 187
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 veneer of modern civilization and showing 
 what is underneath the somewhat polished 
 and deceptive surface. But more than all this, 
 Hewlett quite frankly displays himself as the 
 beauty-intoxicated poet, revelling in outdoor 
 England as a garden of delights, lovingly tell- 
 ing over the tale of its charm of hedgerows, 
 woods and streams. He is still a romanti- 
 cist, but one who is gradually orienting him- 
 self in the world about him, and who is bidding 
 a final farewell to the gauds and the glories of 
 medieval days. The high adventure of love, 
 the reverent pondering upon God in His Heav- 
 en, the heart-tug of ever-recurrent beauty, — 
 these things still appeal to him, but so do the 
 more prosaic subjects of politics and property, 
 socialism and anarchy. For, after all, Hewlett 
 has not been able to escape his age. It has 
 claimed him for its child. Its problems have 
 finally obtruded themselves upon his notice 
 and he is beginning to express his opinions 
 about them. 
 
 "Open Country," the second of a trilogy 
 dealing with the life, works and opinions of 
 John Maxwell Senhouse, treats of a period 
 prior to "Halfway House," is less frankly a 
 story than that book, and depends less than 
 
 188
 
 OPEN COUNTRY 
 
 it upon mere plot. Indeed, in the newer 
 volume Hewlett ranges himself quite plainly 
 as a psychologist. The interest is not so much 
 in what the main puppets do and say as in 
 what they feel and think; in the transforma- 
 tion wrought upon their inner selves by the 
 clash of their desires, beliefs, hopes, and class 
 traditions. The mere story, as such, can be 
 told in a paragraph. Senhouse has a chance 
 meeting with Sanchia Percival, becomes her 
 friend, comrade and instructor in many things, 
 falls in love with her in somewhat shadowy 
 fashion, and gives her up when he finds that 
 she has conceived a passion for Nevile Ingram, 
 already unhappily married to a woman of 
 little character and less morals. It can be 
 seen from this that the story is tenuous. But 
 it is precisely this story, which, after all, is 
 very possible, that is the occasion for the 
 amazingly long letters which constitute the 
 chief charm of the book. They form the com- 
 plete clue to the soul of Senhouse, the dilet- 
 tante tramp who has given up riches and 
 society for the fun of planting exotic flowers 
 in out-of-the-way- corners of England and for 
 the adventures to be had on the winding 
 white roads. Senhouse is more of a talker 
 
 189
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 and writer than he is a tinker or a painter. 
 When interested, he is ready to pour out in 
 conversation or in letters everything that he 
 has felt or observed or dreamed or thought. 
 Sanchia, whom with vision-blinded eyes he sees 
 as a reincarnation of a Greek Goddess, whom 
 he madly invokes as his Artemis the Bright, 
 his Artemis Hymnia„is adored not so much as 
 a woman but as the embodiment of his dream 
 of virginal purity, all unconscious of her 
 chastity and her charm. She inspires the best 
 that is in him and he writes exquisite pas- 
 sages that read like poetry in solution. He 
 opens to the girl's young and growing mind 
 new and unexpected vistas, preaches the doc- 
 trine of the freedom of the individual, and 
 proclaims that he has cut down all the barriers 
 that hedged him about. The point of this 
 "comedy with a sting" is that he finds in San- 
 chia too apt a pupil. Growing wise under his 
 tutelage, she feels that his passion for her is 
 not very deep, is not the kind in which 
 there is love's last clear call. 
 
 He has convinced her that every man is 
 honest and every woman good when in love. 
 He has proclaimed that under present laws 
 to offer woman marriage is to insult all that 
 
 190
 
 OPEN COUNTRY 
 
 is best and noblest in her. He beholds the 
 girl as lovely and tells her so. He conceives 
 her as saintly and desires her to be a saint. 
 But by doing these things he robs himself of 
 any chance of winning her, if he ever really 
 desired to do so. He pushes her into the 
 arms of another and that other not worthy of 
 her. He is seen as the anarchist on the sub- 
 ject of marriage, pleading with Ingram to 
 divorce his wife and marry the infatuated girl. 
 Finally, last and most crushing irony of all, 
 his pleading is of no avail, and Sanchia joins 
 Ingram without benefit of clergy. 
 
 The main psychology of the piece is con- 
 cerned with Senhouse. He is a most convinc- 
 ing and complete figure. In his mouth is 
 placed the expression of the leading ideas, the 
 ideas one feels sure are to recur in the future 
 Hewlett novels. Briefly, these are a passion- 
 ate devotion to a certain pantheistic concep- 
 tion of the God-principle; a romantically 
 anarchic view about the laws of property 
 and marriage; an intense feeling of the need 
 for greater simplicity and temperance in liv- 
 ing than is exhibited by men of this century. 
 
 To a certain extent, Senhouse is the preach- 
 er and expounder of the Hewlett propaganda. 
 
 191
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 Sanchia is a slighter figure. She is more 
 passive than active. Her creator has estab- 
 lished for her a certain physical charm, a cer- 
 tain innocence — or is it a divine ignorance? — 
 a certain courage, but there is not revealed in 
 the book quite the lure that she is supposed 
 to have for the men who find her loveworthy. 
 Her remarks are too often common-place. 
 There is nothing of the Rosalind-quality, but 
 there is at times a certain naivete, a certain 
 piquancy and there is, as was to be expected 
 in a novel of psychological tendencies, the 
 unfolding of the gradual development of her 
 heart and mind. The lesser characters, who 
 serve to throw the main ones into clearer re- 
 lief, are drawn with great skill. They are 
 human and convincing,, painted in Hewlett's 
 best humourous manner. 
 
 On the whole, "Open Country" affords good 
 entertainment. It is a book of beauty, with 
 passages almost lyrical in their poetical inten- 
 sity. It abounds in true feeling for youth and 
 its golden passions. It has paeans in honour 
 of nature and life in the open. It is a roman- 
 tic comedy in which the author reveals himself 
 once more as the possessor of a proper wit, 
 with a power for social satire and humourous 
 
 192
 
 OPEN COUNTRY 
 
 dialogue that arises from a keen and true un- 
 derstanding of English castes. He gives his 
 readers cause, between smiles, to stop for 
 serious thought. For he is becoming a dis- 
 secter of souls, a searcher of hearts, a prober 
 of minds, at the same time that he is ex- 
 hibiting himself as a propagandist as distinc- 
 tive in his way as Meredith and as romanti- 
 cally anarchistic as any man of his time. His 
 goal is evidently the phychological novel of 
 ideas — something radically different from his 
 triumphs in the novels of romance and action. 
 In "Open Country" he has taken a definite 
 step towards his new goal. 
 
 "The Ruinous Face" lacks the romantic 
 fervour of the usual Hewlett story. It has, 
 rather, a sort of classic restraint, a calm al- 
 most severe style that is befitting in a tale of 
 Helen of Troy. This piece of work is in es- 
 sence a tragedy. 
 
 In Homer, of course, Helen is presented as 
 the sufferer much more than as offender. 
 The Greeks make war to avenge her wrongs 
 as well as those of Menelaus. The chieftain 
 regards her always as a person stolen from 
 him and deems Paris a robber. Helen is 
 drawn as a woman with refinement of charac- 
 
 193
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 ter and as one who is torn by homeward 
 longings. There is no indication of her feel- 
 ing a genuine passion or even affection for 
 Paris. In contrast to the attitude toward Hel- 
 en displayed by the later Greek tragedians, 
 who represented her as a worthless woman, 
 Homer, on the whole, speaks of her in lauda- 
 tory epithets. In the regular story she goes 
 home with Menelaus after the fall of Troy. 
 
 Hewlett has taken the Homeric conception 
 of the honesty of Helen and a Rhodian tale 
 of her suicide and builded out of these materi- 
 als an entirely new legend. Helen is seen 
 as the victim of her own great beauty. She 
 is presented as the woman longing always for 
 warm, human friendship, for the lover who 
 is comrade also. She is one who day-dreams 
 of home and children. But her dreams are 
 always shattered. Her ruinous face, her per- 
 fect form call up the beast in men's eyes and 
 hearts. Paris, Menelaus, even the slave who 
 seemed to be her friendly servitor, all, all when 
 the test comes prove lustful instead of truly 
 loving. So that the woman, weary of her eter- 
 nal shame at their hands, goes out into the gar- 
 den land hangs herself. It is an absolutely origi- 
 nal and poignant ending to an ancient story. 
 
 194
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 THE Abbe Huet in 1678, in a discussion 
 of the works of Mme. Lafayette, gave 
 the following definition: "What are 
 properly called romances are fictions of love 
 adventures, written in prose with art, for the 
 pleasure and instruction of readers." 
 
 As written over two centuries ago, this 
 definition applies in the main to most of Mr. 
 Hewlett's tales, whether they be little novels, 
 historical chronicles or novels of manners. In 
 the main they are true stories about love ad- 
 ventures, — "fond adventures," as Mr. Hewlett 
 calls them. 
 
 His early romances are the kind of tales 
 which take the road and put up at strange 
 castles and crazy huts, rescue women in 
 trouble, as often as not fall in with damsels 
 in distress, who, when occasion requires, mas- 
 querade in boy's clothes like any Rosalind; 
 they are books which have deeds of derring-do 
 in battle and tournament and end with the 
 love-crowned play of the hero and meek maid. 
 
 195
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 This is as one would expect. Mr. Hewlett's 
 early reading was concerned with romantic 
 authors. He was well versed in the lore of 
 medieval Italy and in the fabliaux of old 
 France. As a young man, he was a lecturer 
 and reviewer on medieval topics. This fact 
 not only influences his style and his choice of 
 subject, but his manner of presenting his 
 themes. Unlike the classic novelists of 
 England, he does not dally by the way, in- 
 dulging himself in disgressions, interpolations 
 and reflections. Like some jongleur of old, 
 whose audience was impatient to hear the finis 
 of the tale, he takes up his narrative with the 
 doings of his main characters and marches 
 swiftly and bravely to the end. But he Te- 
 rrains always the jongleur. It is for this 
 reason that the I-tone is so prominent in his 
 work. He is the teller of tales, establishing 
 a direct relation between himself and you. He 
 has fashioned this tale for your delight. And 
 as he is primarily interested in tale-telling, it 
 follows that he is not greatly concerned with 
 the proving of theses. 
 
 Valera, the Spanish novelist, once wrote that 
 it was bad taste, always impertinent and of- 
 ten pedantic to attempt to prove theses by 
 
 196
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 writing stories. According to this view, the 
 "purpose novel" is so much the less a novel 
 and so much the more a sermon. Mr. Hew- 
 lett's practice agrees with this dictum. Mere- 
 dith — whose follower Hewlett is now accused 
 of being — differs with Valera. His stories are 
 thesis novels. 
 
 Of Meredith, Arthur Symons, one of the 
 wisest of modern critics, said : "Writing prose 
 then, as if it were poetry, with an endeavour 
 to pack every phrase with imaginative mean- 
 ing, every sentence, you realize will be an 
 epigram. And as every sentence is to be an 
 epigram, so every chapter is to be a crisis. And 
 every book is to be at once a novel, realistic, 
 a romance, a comedy of manners; it is to 
 exist for its story, its characters, its philoso- 
 phy and every interest is to be equally 
 prominent. And all the characters in it are to 
 live at full speed without a moment's repose; 
 their very languors are to be fevers." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett, too, often writes prose as if 
 it were poetry; his style is sometimes not en- 
 hanced, but marred by things derived from the 
 practice of poets. But he avoids the Meredith- 
 ian mistake of having all his people talk in 
 epigram. Mr. Hewlett's more often than not 
 
 197
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 speak in character. They do not go about 
 carelessly emitting brilliants. And, again, in 
 the art of Mr. Hewlett not every chapter is a 
 crisis. On the contrary, with rare exceptions, 
 every chapter contributes to the general for- 
 ward march of the tale. Like Meredith, his 
 novels are at once realistic and romantic and 
 comedies of manners, but they exist for the 
 story and the characters, and are little con- 
 cerned with philosophy. Meredith's designs 
 have always been great, but his execution 
 has not always been equal to the plans thus 
 formed. Mr. Hewlett has been more modest 
 in his designs and correspondingly more suc- 
 cessful in his execution. He has not been 
 concerned for originality of plot. Hence the 
 frequent challenge of comparison with great 
 names in literature. He has not scrupled to 
 employ great historical figures and he has not 
 hesitated to violate the law, seemingly made so 
 absolute by Scott, that great historic figures 
 must take a minor place in historical novels. 
 In Mr. Hewlett's books the great historical 
 figures are the main actors. It is the minor 
 personages, invented by Mr. Hewlett, who 
 throw light upon the springs of action that 
 
 198
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 supposedly determined the course of Richard 
 and of Mary, Queen of Scots. 
 
 In "Buondelmonte's Saga," a reconstruction 
 of an old Florentine event, he gives some in- 
 sight into his method. Indeed, with a greater 
 lack of reticence than usual, he permits a 
 glance into his workshop : "As I do not think 
 the worse of a tale because it may be true, 
 so it is no detriment to it in my eyes that 
 it has been pieced together from a hundred 
 scraps — remnants, shavings, bits of brick and 
 plaster, a sentence torn from a letter, a sharp 
 saying passed into a proverb, the battered 
 stump of an old tower, the memory (not gone 
 yet) of wicked old hatreds or high young 
 loves. One may assume, I take it, a certain 
 decorum in the process. The raking and 
 scraping, the groping and poring over rub- 
 bish heaps and rag-bags, should be done in 
 decent darkness, where a man, in the company 
 of the shaded candle, may shed tears with- 
 out a shameful face; the work has its poig- 
 nancy; the refashioned thing should not lack 
 it either. What my own may want in this 
 last particular I am not bound to discuss be- 
 forehand. I confess to the raking and scrap- 
 ing, to the shifting and piecing together, and 
 
 199
 
 MAURIQE HEWLETT 
 
 will own to a wet eye or so if you press me. 
 No more. I hope that I have got the dust 
 away, and that the old bones are none the 
 worse for my galvanism. They were great 
 flesh once." 
 
 Precisely! In these novels there is a touch 
 of morbidezza which sometimes makes the 
 reader feel that there is something unreal and 
 strange, something that the author sets all 
 his powers to overcome. And he does over- 
 come it very largely by dint of the marvelous 
 style with which he has clothed on his tales 
 and also by dint of the fact that he is a master 
 of atmosphere. He is always punctilious in 
 the care with which he paints in his back- 
 grounds. He gives the tone and temper of 
 the times. He does not scruple to use plain 
 words and to picture ugly deeds in getting his 
 effects. He is not prudish; neither is he 
 prurient. His men and women are veritable 
 flesh, subject to its passions and its lusts, and 
 in its gratifications they are often hurled 
 down life's precipices. 
 
 Now what of the characters in these novels? 
 Thomas Hardy smiles at Wessex folk, but 
 he loves them too and depicts them and all 
 their ways. Barrie often sheds tears with 
 
 200
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Thrums' inhabitants, but he is content to re- 
 veal their humble comedies and tragedies. 
 Kipling, in the main, deals with the Anglo- 
 Indian and the subject races. Meredith and 
 Mr. Hewlett are cosmopolitans, Mr. Hewlettt 
 more so than the older man. Italy of the 
 Renaissance and the post-Renaissance, France 
 of the crusades, Scotland of Mary's day, Eng- 
 land of George and of King Edward, these are 
 the times and the lands that have occupied 
 him. 
 
 For Mr. Hewlett youth is the age of ages; 
 woman the sex. His few boys and girls are 
 not the close studies given by Barrie, nor the 
 marvelous ones of Meredith. His boys and 
 girls are really not young, save in years. 
 They are mature in knowledge, raised in the 
 forcing-house of the hot Italian air for the 
 most part, prematurely wise, prematurely witty, 
 and gallant or sinful as the case may be. The 
 typical Hewlett boy is Angioletto in "The 
 Judgment of Borso," a youth well-equipped in 
 all ways for life in the Italian courts. Mr. 
 Hewlett's men are in the main, "galliards," 
 young, hopeful, adventurous, pricking forth 
 into the world, finding fights, wars, obstacles 
 and — woman. They are gallant, they are roman- 
 
 201
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 tic and — the truth must be told— of a certain 
 English stolidity which takes the sweet ser- 
 vice of the gentler sex too much for granted. 
 Prosper le Gai marries Isoult and forgets her 
 until her constant service and her growing 
 beauty force themselves upon his notice. 
 
 So with Francis Strelley and his Virginia. 
 So,, too, Osmund Manvers, in his wooden way, 
 accepts the sacrifices of Manuela and bestows 
 her upon his valet. Richard has something 
 of this in his relations with Jehane, Bothwell 
 with Mary. 
 
 Mr. Hewlett's art is an aristocratic art. It 
 does not deal with "common" people save only 
 as the most minor figures. His Isoult is dis- 
 covered of noble birth. His Virginia's beau- 
 ty is accounted for by her heritage from the 
 Strozzi. As a necessary accompaniment of his 
 romantic youths, are his swashbucklers, gam- 
 blers and adventures, — Cavaliere Acquamor- 
 ta in "The Fool Errant," Brazenhead in the 
 Canterbury tales, Mosca in "The Judgment of 
 Borso." 
 
 Mr. Hewlett is mainly interested in his 
 women. They are the pivots about whom 
 his comedies and tragedies move. And his 
 treatment of them differs from all the great 
 
 802
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 contemporary novelists. Kipling gives snap- 
 shot photographs of women. He shows them 
 in certain brief moments of their existence, in 
 vivid blacks and whites, caught on the instant 
 whether the subjects were laughing or cry- 
 ing. Stevenson's few women are presented 
 in silhouette. Barrie and Hardy give etchings 
 in which line by line and with the most pains- 
 taking art, the features are drawn. But Mere- 
 dith and Mr. Hewlett give paintings in which 
 brush stroke after brush stroke has been used. 
 The reader beholds the finished work, true not 
 only in features, but in colouring. 
 
 In his great novels, Hardy has been obsessed 
 with the half pagan idea of the inexorable- 
 ness of things. His women are almost always 
 the playthings of inscrutable, blind fate, 
 caught up and often whirled to their doom. 
 They do not dominate. "They are stray 
 angels in bonds, who stand forever in mortal 
 fear of losing their reputations. Social law 
 is everywhere in conspiracy against their 
 souls." He scarcely believes in good women 
 and bad women. He sees only women affected 
 by good or evil circumstances. 
 
 For Meredith, women are still creatures of 
 the chase; but he pleads for a nobler sphere 
 
 203
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 of action for them; he mocks modern marital 
 conditions; he would see woman uplifted, the 
 comrade, not the plaything of man. He has 
 nothing but contempt for women who are 
 ignorant of or content with their subjection. 
 
 Now Mr. Hewlett is purely medieval. The 
 Hewlett woman is forever the plaything of 
 love. She is always in the attitude of the 
 pursuing who is pursued. She is forever the 
 subject of passion, holy or unholy. Men will 
 fight for her, plunge kingdoms and cities in 
 war or ruin for her, die for her. Sometimes, 
 as in "The Stooping Lady," she is the willing 
 object of this love and stoops to enjoy its 
 divine benison; sometimes she flees from it 
 when it displays a satyr face as in "The 
 Duchess of Nona;" sometimes she is caught 
 up in its tragic coil as in "The Queen's Quair," 
 and destroyed by it. Hewlett's women, like 
 Hardy's, are stray angels, but like Meredith's 
 they are creatures of the chase. And, note 
 the difference from Meredith ! — this, according 
 to the gospel of Mr. Hewlett, is as it should 
 be. 
 
 Since it is woman's proper fate to be loved, 
 it would seem to be impossible for Mr. Hew- 
 lett to write a story in which there is not some 
 
 204
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 romantic love interest. And in each case 
 there is a stoop on the part of one. The stoop 
 may be happy or the reverse, but it is there, 
 He recurs to the idea again and again, but 
 each time with a difference that prevents 
 monotony. 
 
 In the main, Mr. Hewlett's women are good 
 women. They are loyal and loving, ready 
 alike to take beatings or kisses. There is no 
 ice in their bosoms which must needs be 
 thawed. Nor are Mr. Hewlett's women 
 "kind" after the manner of the Stendhal char- 
 acters. They are not women who make them- 
 selves common. For the most part, they are 
 Rosalinds and Perditas of an humbler sort, 
 with the beauty of those immortal girls, but 
 without their supreme wit and high spirits. 
 They are girls who are stricken down with 
 love's dart and who make no effort to remove 
 the dear missiles. They are true dwellers in ro- 
 mance-land, beautiful creatures who give 
 themselves to their chosen lords without 
 thought of sin or of the future. 
 
 But Mr. Hewlett is not only successful in 
 depicting characters. He has wonderful des- 
 criptive powers. He fills his books with poetic 
 allusions to wind and weather. He conveys 
 
 205
 
 MAURICE HEWLETT 
 
 with wonderful skill any impression received 
 through the so-called five senses. Alike in 
 battle pieces and in calm pictures of an Ital- 
 ian dawn, he is convincing. It was for these 
 reasons that Mr. Max Beerbohm, himself no 
 mean user of English, wrote: 
 
 "For sheer artistry in the use of words, Mr. 
 Hewlett beats anyone since Robert Louis 
 Stevenson and Walter Pater." 
 
 Hewlett's masters in style have been Sir 
 Thomas Browne, the Bible, Don Quixote in 
 English, Mallory and Carlyle, with much 
 culled, by the way, from Dante and the early 
 Italians. He displays at times the gaudy 
 splendor of Ruskin; he sounds the strident 
 brass tones of Carlyle. 
 
 For the most part his style is swift in move- 
 ment. It is not slow, subtle and insinuating. 
 It does not bide its time. It leaps at the 
 reader. It does not disdain to use words 
 culled from the English provinces, from the 
 Scotch, and from old books and plays. But 
 whatever its sources, hold it up to the light, 
 to iadopt a phrase from Mr. A. B. Walkley, 
 and this style displays the water mark of Mr. 
 Hewlett. For, after taking away what he has 
 learned from others, after deducting what is 
 
 206
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 conciously or unconciously reminiscent of his 
 masters, there is something left that has the 
 tang of the man's own personality, that makes 
 the reader think of the author as a fact in 
 back of his style. 
 
 Style can not be placed in the critical test 
 tube and analyzed* any more than the chemist 
 can fully explain the wonderful wizardry by 
 which the rose produces its colour and per- 
 fume. The reader recognizes a certain colour 
 and perfume of style, so to speak, which this 
 man produces. It is so individual that it has 
 sometimes produced the critical folly of speak- 
 ing of it as "artificial style." Style, of course, 
 in its very being is artifice. In a day marked 
 by the scribbling of novels marred a hundred 
 times by slip-shod English, the critics should 
 rejoice when they find an artist who delights 
 in fine English, who tries to play all the tunes 
 of which the superb instrument is capable, 
 who follows Pater's demands that writers 
 should find time to use English more as a 
 learned language.
 
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