V
FRIENDS THROUGH THE PEN
Maurice Hewlett combined to an unusual degree those salient characteristics that go to make the great writer: he was a discerning observer, and had formed the habit of analyzing what he observed; his personal experiences had taught him the significance of what he had seen and enabled him to assess its valuation. Beyond all,—having observed, analyzed, and understood,—he possessed the power to interpret to others.
At the time I first met him, The Queen’s Quair was having a tremendous run, and the volume naturally came into the conversation.
“In spite of its success,” he said with much feeling, “I am disappointed over its reception. I have always wanted to write history, but not the way history has always been written. There are certain acts attributed to the chief characters which, if these characters are studied analytically, are obviously impossible; yet because a certain event has once been recorded it keeps on being repeated and magnified until history itself becomes a series of distortions. Mary, Queen of Scots, has always been my favorite historical figure, and I know that in The Queens Quair I have given a truer picture of her character than any that at present exists. But alas,” he added with a sigh, “no one accepts it as other than fiction.”
After this statement from him I turned again to my copy of The Queen’s Quair and re-read the author’s prologue, in which I found:
A hundred books have been written and a hundred songs sung; men enough of these latter days have broken their hearts over Queen Mary’s; what is more to the point is that no heart but hers was broken at the 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 she might fall free of the mire. Alas, the mire swallowed them up and she needs must conceal her pretty feet. This is the note 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 because none ever sought her heart. Here, then, is a book which has sought nothing else, and a song which springs from that only.
I wonder if every writer in his heart does not feel the same ambition. The novelist is a story-teller who recites bed-time stories to his audience of grown-up children, while the humorist plays the clown; but in writing history one is dealing with something basic. Within a year a volume has been published containing alleged documentary evidence to prove that Mary, Queen of Scots, was innocent of the charge of treason. What a triumph if an author through character analysis could correct tradition! It was a loss to the world that Hewlett permitted himself to be discouraged by unsympathetic critics from carrying out a really big idea.
To meet Maurice Hewlett at his home at Broad Chalke, a little English village nearly ten miles from a railroad station, and to walk with him in his garden, one might recognize the author of The Forest Lovers; but an afternoon with him at a London club would develop another side which was less himself. Instead of discussing flowers and French memoirs and biography in a delightfully whimsical mood, Hewlett’s slight, wiry figure became tense, his manner alert, his eyes keen and watchful. In the country he was the dreamer, the bohemian, wholly detached from the world outside; in the city he was confident and determined in approaching any subject, his voice became crisp and decisive, his bearing was that of the man of the world.
His early life was more or less unhappy, due partly to his precociousness which prevented him from fitting in with youth of his own age. This encouraged him to reach beyond his strength and thus find disappointment.