But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there, they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent, breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled—hilarious, crude, outlandish—they didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.
If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking in low voices—asking each other hesitating little questions about what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the window, intently peering at them.
There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed. The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while, and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another portion of the disguise—as it looked—that he had been so long building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the nauseating entrails of his mind—so comfortable from the outside—and forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and left him they could hear him sobbing—great, deep-voiced, mountainous sobs that shook his bed.
But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the fanatic about his rôle of humorist.
I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful, interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same. But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric light—that unaccountably had sparks, as well.
W. T. BISSELL.
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.