“I was never a boy,” he said once, “except possibly after the time when I should have been a man. As I look back on my youth, it was filled with discouragements.”
The classics fascinated him, and he absorbed Dante. Then Shelley and Keats shared the place of the Italian poet in his heart. Even after he married, he continued to gratify his love of Bohemia, and his wife wandered with him through Italy, with equal joy; while in England they camped out together in the New Forest,—the scene of The Forest Lovers.
The peculiar style which Hewlett affected in many of his volumes resulted, he told me, from his daily work in the Record Office in London, as Keeper of Land Revenue Records and Enrolments, during which period he studied the old parchments, dating back to William the Conqueror. In this respect his early experience was not unlike that of Austin Dobson’s, and just as the work in the Harbours Department failed to kill Dobson’s poetic finesse, so did Hewlett rise above the deadly grind of ancient records and archives. In fact it was during this period that Hewlett produced Pan and the Young Shepherd, which contains no traces of its author’s archaic environment.
One point of sympathy that drew us closely together was our mutual love for Italy. My first desire to know Maurice Hewlett better was after reading his Earthwork Out of Tuscany, Little Novels of Italy, and The Road in Tuscany. I have always preferred these volumes to any of his later ones, as to me they have seemed more spontaneous and more genuine expressions of himself. We were talking about Italy, one day, when he made a remark which caused me to suggest that what he said was the expression of a modern humanist. Hewlett was obviously surprised yet pleased by my use of this expression.
“I don’t often meet any one interested in the subject of humanism,” he said. “It is one of my hobbies.”
I explained my association with Doctor Guido Biagi, librarian of the Laurenziana Library at Florence, and the work I had done there in connection with my designs for a special face of type, based upon the beautiful hand letters of the humanistic scribes (see page [16]). With that introduction we discussed the great importance of the humanistic movement as the forerunner and essence of the Renaissance. We talked of Petrarch, the father of humanism, and of the courageous fight he and his sturdy band of followers made to rescue the classics. We both had recently read Philippe Monnier’s Le Quattrocento, which gave additional interest to our discussion.
“Monnier is the only writer I have ever read who has tried to define humanism,” Hewlett continued. “He says it is not only the love of antiquity, but the worship of it,—a worship carried so far that it is not limited to adoration alone, but which forces one to reproduce.”
“And the humanist,” I added, picking up the quotation from Monnier, which I knew by heart, “is not only the man who knows intimately the ancients and is inspired by them; it is he who is so fascinated by their magic spell that he copies them, imitates them, rehearses their lessons, adopts their models and their methods, their examples and their gods, their spirit and their tongue.”
“Well, well!” he laughed; “we have struck the same street, haven’t we! But does that exactly express the idea to you? It isn’t antiquity we worship, but rather the basic worth for which the ancients stand.”
