Autograph Letter from Maurice Hewlett
“Monnier refers to the obsession that comes from constant contact with the learning of the past, and the atmosphere thus created,” I replied. “Only last year Biagi and I discussed that very point, sitting together in his luxuriant garden at Castiglioncello, overlooking the Gulf of Leghorn. The ‘basic worth’ you mention is really Truth, and taking this as a starting point, we worked out a modern application of Monnier’s definition:
“The humanist is one who holds himself open to receive Truth, unprejudiced as to its source, and, after having received Truth, realizes his obligation to give it out again, made richer by his personal interpretation.”
“There is a definition with a present application,” Hewlett exclaimed heartily. “I like it.—Did you have that in mind when you called me a modern humanist, just now?”
“No one could read Earthwork Out of Tuscany and think otherwise,” I insisted.
Hewlett held out his hand impulsively. “I wish I might accept that compliment with a clear conscience,” he demurred.
Meeting Austin Dobson after he became interpreter-in-chief of the eighteenth century, it was difficult to associate him with his earlier experiences as a clerk in the Board of Trade office, which he entered when he was sixteen years old, and to which service he devoted forty-five useful but uneventful years, rising eventually to be a principal in the Harbours Department. With so quiet and unassuming a personality, it seems incredible that he could have lifted himself bodily from such unimaginative environment, and, through his classic monographs, bring Steele, Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Horace Walpole, Fanny Burney, Bewick, and Hogarth, out of their hazy indefiniteness, and give to them such living reality. Perhaps Dobson’s very nature prevented him from seeing the coarseness and indecency of the period, and enabled him to introduce, or perhaps reintroduce, to England from France the ballade and the chante royal, the rondeau and the rondel, the triolet, the villanelle, and other fascinating but obsolete poetical forms in which he first became interested through his French grandmother.
Dobson was the most modest literary man I ever met. I happened to be in London at the time when the English government bestowed upon him an annuity of £1,000, “for distinguished service to the crown.” When I congratulated him upon this honor his response was characteristic:
“I don’t know why in the world they have given me this, unless it is because I am the father of ten children. I have no doubt that would be classified under ‘distinguished service to the crown.’”