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.
RICHARD L. PURDY.
The Egolatress
Infinitely more lovely in the winter darkness than in the revealing light of day, Summit Avenue stretched beneath the moon. The clashing architectures of the huge houses were mercifully blurred into harmony by the night, and the long piles of snow drew the picture into a loose, graceful unity. Beneath the glowing strands of the boulevard lights flowed a double current of automobiles, in smooth streams that wound out to the suburbs and downtown to the bays of commerce and amusement.
Before the doors of the Territorial Club the streams turned in a sweeping curve, and occasionally cars left the current to turn in, pause a moment before the pseudo-Gothic entrance, and then join the parked flank in the driveway.
A long blue roadster, once sleek and new, now battered, and dusty still from months of confinement, slid to a stop, like a stick caught on the bank of a stream. The young driver busied himself with the intricate process of locking his car. It was dear to him. His companion climbed out, shivering.
“Great Scott! You have cold nights up there,” he said. “At home there’s no snow on the ground at all.”
The owner of the car laughed. “You’ll get used to it, in two weeks. Throw that rug over the radiator, will you?” He finished locking the car, got out, and, as an extra precaution, lifted the hood and disconnected the spark-plugs.