LITERATURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18896, 23 June 1923, Page 16

LITERATURE.

MAURICE HEWLETT. NOVELIST AND POET. ' Bt Constant Readbb. “The death is announced of Maurice Hewlett, author, aged 62" ; the reading of this cabio message recalled the Juno of nine years ago when, on the invitation of Mr Hewlett himself, I made a morning call at Northwick terrace, in the North-west of London, and spent an interesting hour in his company Three or four years earlier Mr Hewlett had published the last book of the triology, comprising “Half-way House: a Comedy of Degrees" ; “Open Country: a Comedy with a Sting"; and “Rest Harrow; a Comedy of Resolution," around which stories a fierce controversy had raged in New Zealand as elsewhere. 1 have been concerned to defend the inherent morality cf these stories, and in so doing had come

into epistolary contact with the author. More important still, Mr Hewlett had published in 1913 that weird and wonderful took “Lore of Proserpine." implicit’in its belief in fairies, absolutely in lino with the mystic studies of "A. E.,” and infinitely more convincing than the photographic reproductions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The house in Forest Gate scarcely seemed the placo to talk about fairies. It w’as typical suburbia and absolutely moral. The conversation ran on two lines, socialism and aviation, in both of which Mr Hewlett was (intensely interested, llis wife was an intrepid airwoman. Before her marriage in 3911, as Hilda Beatrice Herbert, she was the first Englishwoman te ecine the certi-

ficate of the Royal Aero c oas a qualified air , pilot. In June of 1914 Air Hewlett scented misfortune in the air. He spoke almost pessimistically of the impending crash consequent on the gathering forces of socialism, and he had great ideas on the development of aviation. That was before the war, and of recent years Mr Hewlett lias shown himself alarmed and bitter that people generally have learned so little from the lessons of the Great Wav.

The hopes Maurice Hewlett fondly entertained wero expressed in some words writ, ton in 1916, as appendix to the preface to “The Song of tho Plow" —the original preface was penned in 1915—echoing a similar sentiment, voiced by Mr G. K. Chesterton in his "Short History of England”: — As for tho War, and our part of it. it is yet too early to do more than dream what the upshot for .humanity may be: . . . Nothing in history had prepared us for the uprising of our Peasantry so soon as the issue was plain: it was wonderful that they rose, still more wonderful that they should have seen what was really at stake. By these two acts they declared themselves at once responsible

citizens and the equals of their masters. My hope is that their masters may .not forget, since they themselves certainly will not. If a, war which has stultified tho very Idea of Manhood has neverthe-

less made the British and their governors one people, ir is worth the horror and the shame, and our sons’ sons may bless the Germans unawares.

How bitterly Mr Hewlett was disappointed in his fond anticipations could be seen in his contributions to journalism, notably the essays which appeared in The Nation during 1921. • More _ recently he has been doing literary criticism for The Mercury. One article in particular, entitled “A Journey to Cockaigne.” pictured Lon•don on the first day of Ascot Week when the great miners’ strike was pending. Mr Hewlett wrote: — I watched for some time the endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith road. I had often seen it hefore-yl mean before the war. It had been a big thing then; but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races. A continuous stream there was. of long,

low, swift, smooth-gliding machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad, vaguely gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated, silk-hntted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole business a dream on (hat account: for though you see and mix with crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you take-away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it. is much move than Shocking : -it is terrifying, it is hideous. ,

Where on earth. I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated, and how did they float, the ha.lanc.s at the hanks? Every one of those motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs (you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick: but not the. chamnngne. and not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison road I could sec. at the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream, mind you. at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was repeating itself on the Fulham road and the King’s road, to say nothing of the Uxbridge road. Who were those neople? Were they all profiteers, or all in other people's debt? It was very odd. Tn the county where T

live we are rather put to it how to keep going. ... On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives in the scorching grev villages of Durham and the Tvne were not standing with me in Addison road that day at Ascot. Or if South Wales oral Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them lot loose on London iust then. Nothing was further , from London’s rnind than of those vexed and seething provinces. Where did Maurice Hewlett learn his Jove for the “underdog” end add to his ’advocacy on their behalf? Tie was for four

years keener of the Land Revenue Records «md Enrollment? in T ondon, and. delving into the musty Past, he learned manv lessons of present-day application. Mr C. Lewis writes intimately and interestingly on this point; The Record office, London, hides. You may walk up Chancery lane and not notice it; but there it is, a little east of tne Lane, near Fleet street, a noble building, rather spick and span, a cheerful contrast to the musty, mouldering documents that Ho within. When I think of the Record Office, which is not r {ten.

I think of Domesday Book and Maurice Hewlett.

Domesday book was completed in 1086; Maurice Hewlett was employed in the Record Office, as Keeper of Land Revenue Records and Enrollments from 1896 to 1900. During those four years he must

have pored over many time-stained parchments written in the centuries that have passed since William the Conqueror ordered the census or survey of England known as Domesday Book. In those four years he garnered from the original documents his love for the Past.

Mr Lewis Hind asks the question, “What would have happened had not Maurice Hewlett spent four years in the Record Office and nad ho not buried himself in the Sagas?” He remarks, “One would have thought that this dry-as-dust occupation would'Miave stifled the poet in him.” Not so, however. Maurice Hewlett explains in his preface to “Lore of Proserpine” that, the 'book has an autobiographical cast; indeed, in that preface may be found the key to much that the admirers only of the early Hewlett, author of “Pan and the Young Shepherd” and “The Forest Lovers,” fail altogether to understand. Even so sound an American critic as Frederic Tabor Cooper speaks of Mr Hewlett having “temporarily” gone "grievously astray’’ in “Half-way Home” —a book which I and others regard as the summit of the novelist's romantic achievement. To return, to the preface to ■‘The Lore of Proserpine,” Mr Hewlett .writes

As I grow older it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish one kind of appearance from another and to say, that is real, and again, this is illusion. Honestly. i meet in my daily walks innumerable beings, to all sensible signs, male and female. Some of them I can touch, some smell, some speak with, some discern otherwise than by sight. Bur if you cannot trust your eyes, why snould "you, trust your nose or your fingers? There is my difficulty in talking about reality. There is another wav of getting at the truth after all. If a tiling is not sensibly true, it may be morally so. If it is not phenomenally true, it may be so substantially. And it is possible that one may see substance in the idiom, so to speak, of the senses. That._ I take it, is how Cle Greeks saw thunderstorms and, other Huge convulsions: that is how they saw meadow, grove, and stream—in terms of Their own lair humanity. They saw; such natural phenomena as shadows of spiritual conflict or spiritual calm, and within the appearance 'apprehended the truth, So it may be that 1 have done. Some such may no the explanation of all fairy experience. Let it be so. It is a fact. I believe, that there is nothing revealed-in

this book which will not bear a spiritual and a moral interpretation; and I venture to say of some of it that the moral implications involved are exceedingly momentous and timely too. I need not refer to such matters any further. If they don’t speak for themselves they will get no help from a preface.

Mr Hewlett says of the English people as a whole that they don't want to know things, but only to feel them, and they are ashamed of their need. For that reason he did not set down many things he had learned from the fairy folk because the human race will not bear to be told fundamental facts about itself. “To write of the sexes in English,” says Maurice Hewlett, “you must either be sentimental or a satirist. You must set the emotions at work; otherwise you must be quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge and there’s a reason why we have no fairy lore because we can’t keep our feelings in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we have none.”

Few men possessed so remarkable a combination of qualities of heart and mind as did Maurice Hewlett. This accounts for his surprising versatility as literateur. He began writing in his early twenties and he published both in verse and prose when 25 years of age. Italy was his first love. “I know no one else,” says Mr Hind, "who has Italy so fervently and so delicately in his blood.” His first book of verse was “A Masque of Dead Florentines." and his first hook of prose, “Earthworks Out of Tuscany.” He made his name as a novelist, with “The Forest Lovers," published in 1898; and earned the eulogy of the more discriminating with a pastoral “Pan and the Young Shepherd,” which, published in tho same year, had in it "the steps of youth and the scents of spring.” It is “as fresh as a May morning." In the following year Mr Hewlett returned to his first love with “Little Novels of Italy.” and again five years later with “The Road to Tuscany." In the meantime he tried his hand at some English episodes in the “New Canterbury Tales,” but while “his brain moved to ChauceUs England, his heart speaks of Botticelli’s Italy.” Maurice Hewlett's most popular historical novels arc “The Life and Death of Richard Yea and Nay,” published in 1900, and “The Queen’s Quair: or the Six Years’ Tragedy," published in 1904. dealing respectively with Richard of the Lion Heart and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scot*. “Tho Queen’s Quair” is dedicated to Andrew Lang, “by his permission, and with just reason” for Lang himself had devoted time and thought to solving tho mystery of the complex personality of Mary Stuart. It may be .and probably is apocryphal, but it is reported, that. a Scotsman, after reading "The Queen's Quair” said, “And so is the whole lot of them.” Maurice Hewlett's conception is far removed from that of Mr John Drinkwafer, but after all. in a novel, the story’s the thing. Mr Cooper truly says;—

The Richard of Mr Hewlett may or may not bo the Richard of History, or of “Ivanhoo" and “The Talisman,” but he is a living, ■ breathing human being, a man whom we can see and understand ns we have never understood the more shadowy Richard of history. Similarly his Mary Stuart may not be the Mary Stuart of the old chroniclers or of the modern poets; he has made her a tangible reality, always more wayward, changeful, and moody; full of the witchery of her sex and desperately dependent upon human sympathy and

adulation. According to Mr Cooper; “The Queen’s Quail-” is the supreme example of Mr Hewlett's use of the intimate touch, the final lest of his power to make the reader £ ee. or think they do. Ho quotes the portrait of Mary Stuart as example of the wonderful striking vividness to be gained by the use of familiar simple Anglo-Saxon words. The passage occurs at the beginning of the book: —

A tall, slim girl, petted and pettish, pale yet not unwholesome, she looked like a flower of the heath, lax and delicate. Her akin—but more, the very flesh of her, seemed transparent, with colour that warmed it from within, faintly, with a glow of fine rose. They say that when she drank you could see the red wine run like fire down her throat; and it may

be partly believed. . . . The Cardinal, "‘"who was no rhapSodist.''admitted ' her - “clear: skin, but denied that she ,was a beautiful girl, oven for a Queen. Her nose, he judged, was 100 long, her lips were too thin, her eyes too narrow. He detested her trick of the side-long look. . . . Beautiful. She may not have been: but fine, fine she was all over—sharply, exquisitely cut and modelled; her sweet, smooth chin, her amorous lips, bright red where all else was pale as a tinged rose ; her sensitive nose; her broad high brows; her nook which two hands could hold; her small shoulders and bosom of a child. She had sometimes an intent, considering, wise look—the look of the Queen of Desire, who knew not where to set the bounds of her need, but revealed to no one what tffiTt was.

Writing more than ten years ago, Mr Cooper bracketed Maurice Hewlett with Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad as “pioneers in a new movement in fiction.’’ Ho said “The Kipling of 'Rewards and Fairies.’ the Conrad of bombs and nihilism and secret service, the new Hewlett, the would be Mcredithian, have, drifted too hopelessly apart. Yet there was a short period. less than a decade ago, when in spite of wide differences in theme, in treatment and in outlook, upon life, the respective authors of ‘Kim” and ‘Nostromo ’ and ‘Richard Yea and Nay’ seemed to form a little group apart from their contemporaries.” The point of divergence consists in this, that while Kipling in India and Conrad in the South Seas wrote of places they had visited and people they hove encountered. Maurice Hewlett created his pictures of the Middle Ages, whether in Italy, Spain, or some other clime as the result of musty volumes and faded frescos. Of this his “Sagas Retold” n.ake familiar examples “Frey and His Wife,”

“Thorgills” of “ Treadholt,” “ Gudn'd the Fair,” and “The Outlaw.” Hewlett was a stranger to Norway, yet he pictured what have been styled “these huge monosyllabic heroes, these grown up dolls of Norway, who are always fighting about something that is not worth lighting about.” Next to the “Little Novels of Italy,” perhaps the best of Maurice Hewlett’s collection of short stories is “Fond Adventures : Tales of the South of the World.” published in 1905, treating of life in Mediseval Florence. Using the same technique the novelist has attempted to portray contemporary life and with varying success according to the standpoint of the reader and notably in the trilogy already mentioned—“ Open Country,” “Half-way House,” and “ Rest Harrow.” Whilst opinions may, and do, differ in regard to the actual morality of these stories, novel readers will always be grateful to Mr Hewlett for creating so lovable a character as John Senhousc, expert botanist, gipsy and itinerant tinker by choice, philosopher and social outcast; while the “Letters toSanchia Upon Things as They Are,” reprinted from “Open Country,” will ever remain as examples of what may be accom-

plished by the English language. Mr Hewlett wrote a number of novels which defy classification, such, for example, as “The Fool Errant,” with its latent vein of whimsical humour; “The Stooping Lady,” the novelist’s first attempt at exchanging mediajvalism for modernity; and “Brazenhead the Great,” one of the big swashbuckling heroes of romantic fiction. “The Spanish Jade,” a gill of the gutters; “The Song of Renny ” and “Mrs Lancelot: a Comedy of Assumptions’” “fiendish: a Story in Prodigality,” and “Love and Lucy.” all represent modern life and were written before Mr Hewlett took refuge in the Norwegian sagas. As a poet Mr Hewlett lays no claim to popularity, but his studies in classical verse ana of the evolution of the English peasantry, his “Helen Redeemed and Other

Poems,” his “Song of the Plow.” and especially “The Village Wife’s Lament,” challenge attention from the more seriousminded. In regard to his writings, both in prose and poetry, there will be even among his most ardent admirers much difference of opinion, that being at once a tribute to

his ability and his versatility. With the news of his passing into the land whore liis heroes have preceded him, T cherish the memory of a figure described by one who knew him in ihese words: He, himself, has the look of a man who has thought hard and delved deep, who with the pen has trafficked with great men arid great ladies, and who knows the Scandinavian and Icelandic Sagas as we know cur daily newspapers. An intense man, then, sturdy and wiry; energetic; with a face finely trained and somewhat battered, eyes that watch, lips that, utter quick, incisive comments. A fearless man! Perhaps that is well, as his wife was the first woman aviator, long before the war a builder of airplanes and a dar- ■ uig and skilful flier.