_Maurice Hewlett_
In 1893 Mr. Edmund Gosse, with a fine perception of literary
tendencies, wrote: “It is my conviction that the limits of realism
have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adopted
the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the
lookout to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists
with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be
a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.” The next
year, with “Ebb Tide”, “The Prisoner of Zenda”, and “Under the Red
Robe”, the signs were unmistakable, and what the critics have pleased
to call the Romantic Revival had begun. It was on the crest of this
wave of romanticism that Maurice Hewlett first appeared, and when that
wave had spent itself fifteen years later his best work was done. He
was at once a child of this movement, exhibiting in varied form its
most familiar phases, and a strange free spirit, deriving from no
literary movement, a romanticist by nature, not the exigencies of his
art. And so, if we feel the influence of the period in “The Forest
Lovers”, “The New Canterbury Tales”, “The Fool Errant”, and the rest,
it is in “The Queen’s Quair” and in “Richard Yea-and-Nay” that we
come upon the very essence of Hewlett’s art, an art which was quite
distinctively his own. These two novels he wrote to please himself.
They have been called his finest work.
As Lionel Johnson said of Scott, so he might have said of Maurice
Hewlett: “In him the antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a
science.” Hewlett was mystically touched by the beauty of the Middle
Ages and by the beauty of the Renaissance. He was a mediaevalist, a
quattrocentist par excellence, but above all this, or perhaps, better,
as a physical embodiment of all this, he loved Italy with a passionate,
sensitive love. It was this love for Italy which so subtly affected
his character and gave to his novels their color and their warmth,
although strange enough very little of his life was spent in Italy and
little of his best work deals with its history or its people. It was
of England that he wrote in “The Queen’s Quair”, of England and the
Crusades in “Richard Yea-and-Nay”. So, if we grant to his affection for
Italy and her art the warmth and color of his novels, we must look for
their life, their vitality, to this same England and his understanding
love of her past, his oneness in spirit with even the simplest of those
characters which moved across the broad canvas of her history.
It is not for me to say that either the color and warmth of Italy’s
art or the life and vitality of England’s past were exclusively the
foundation stones of Hewlett’s art. His novels are, all of them,
rich with intermingled threads like tapestry--not the heavy brocaded
tapestry of the poet Spenser, but a tapestry brilliant, yet often
misty and confused, that was quite his own. His backgrounds he built
of hundreds of figures, quickly and sharply etched in a manner
remarkably reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory and Froissart. Against
this background which he had created with so lavish a care he laid his
greater figures--and I think of Richard and John Lackland and the old
King, Henry the Second, from “Richard Yea-and-Nay”--figures which he
had limned with broad, bold strokes and touched with a quiet wit. The
effect is not only that of tapestry but of old stained glass. We marvel
how the simple, splendid figures stand out and are yet a part of a
delicately wrought background.
But in the movement of these greater figures before so complex a
background lay the weakness of Hewlett’s art. He knew the pageantry and
color of the lives he wrote about, but it was not given him to read
deeply beneath the gaily painted surface they presented. The movement
of his characters through the unfolding scenes of his romances is not
puppetry. Hewlett’s touch was too fresh, too original for that. It is
only that we see in part, whereas if he had had the power the whole
would be revealed to us. In his greatest novel, and in that novel
almost alone, the veil is lifted for a few moments. In those moments I
think he knew Richard.
Perhaps, though, more than all else, the factor that can undermine the
permanence of Hewlett’s work is his style. His writing is twisted,
tortured, and--in the reading--perplexing. His prose is almost never
rhythmical; it is often awkward and harsh. The books he wrote to please
himself, his best work, he filled with archaic turns of speech until
their very pages seem to bear the marks of age. They are, as some one
has said, “the inventions of a connoisseur in the queer and remote, a
sort of transformation of Henry James’s involutions into terms of olden
days”.
To cavil at this is difficult, as it is difficult to cavil at the
design and composition of the romances themselves, they are so
characteristic of their author. He turned his hand to modern England
in the novels of the English countryside, “Rest Harrow”, “Halfway
House”, and the others. He came back to the manner of his earlier
period in “Brazenhead the Great” and worked for a time in the field of
Norse legend. But he will be remembered longest by those two strange,
tangled, brilliant romances, “Richard Yea-and-Nay” and “The Queen’s
Quair”, the best expression his art ever found. Maurice Hewlett was a
colorist, a romancer, a passionate lover of ancient ways. We should
give thanks for the mystery of the Bowing Rood in the church of the
nuns at Fontevrault; for the beauty of Richard, his face covered with
his shield, standing at dawn upon the hills before Jerusalem.