Pan and the Young Shepherd : a Pastoral in Two
Acts. By Maurice Hewlett. (John Lane. 3s. 6d.)—Everybody who read "The Forest Lovers" will be Pager to welcome Mr. Hewlett's pastoral of Pan and the Young Shepherd. It is a most interesting and, in part at least, singularly successful experiment in a kind of literature that has few votaries in our day of realism, but which cen hardly fail to put forth an occasional leaf, bud, or blossom in any time, in any place, where the spirit of poetry is still alive to keep tender and moist the tiniest spot on which a seed of sentiment may fall. Mr. Hewlett has already shown himself the felicitous master of considerable springs of humour and tender- ness. If we go on to say that both his tenderness and his humour, when they appear in literature, assume a certain quality of dryness, we shall perhaps lay ourselves open to be told that the expression is inconsistent with allusions made above to springs and moistening influence. But there is no real in- consistency. The quality of the flower is determined not only by the soil from which it grows, but by the air in which it lives. And with us just now the air of the upper regions of literature is so highly rarefied by the counsels of the " realists " and the standards of the " exquisites," that sentiment cannot exist in it, save on the condition of taking on the character of dryness. The way in which Mr. Hewlett's sentiment achieves acclimatisation in an unsenti- mental atmosphere is by embodying itself in an archaic diction and a quaintly artificial plan of composition. But the under- lying allegory is most simple, homely, and of all time,—and withal exceedingly easy to read. Neanias, the shepherd-boy, hears "the world calling him over the moor," and turns restive to the monotony of sheep-minding. He wants to get away and "would like to court a maid,"—and he hints to his grandfather that in these ways one grows from boy to man, and gets wisdom to live by. Geron, the grandfather, answers him in the time- honoured vein of the disillusioned—and of those who have never had illusions—that "the world" is no more than one's small corner of it writ large, and the true wisdom is to be content at
home and shrewd in one's own business :—" I have lived 'twixt ridge and fell my eighty years. Year by year I have seen hoggets grow theaves, and theaves ewes, and ewes drop their lambs and die culls ; I have fed and drunk of them, too wise that they or the world should feed and drink o' me. For the way of the world —see now, I will teach thee wisdom—the way of the world is clutch lest thou be clutchet ; and the wise man huggeth his treasure in a small still, lest, enlarging somewhat, he do but swell another man's hoard. The valley here is the world in small. I am the lord of this world, and the sheep are my hinds, by whose sweat I do live." The boy is as much influenced as young dreamers generally are by the talk of old doers,—and the conversation in which the grandfather and grandson develop their opposite sides of the question in separate monologues—which break into each other without either current being in the slightest degree deflected or even new- coloured by the interruption—is a very exquisite piece of art Indeed, it is so good that the rest of the book suffers a little hardly by inevitable comparison with it. Neanias, though we like him all through the book, is never again so bewitchingly lead, so warmly innocent, so unconsciously a poet, as in this opening scene in which he describes how, one night in a dream, he ran to meet the wind that called to him, and how he saw the Seven Sisters—the world-spirits—and loved them. But though he loved them well, he would not stay with them, nor rest any- where till he was in the deep forest where—" it was all husht and dark,—you saw no sun, but only shafts of blue light running up among the great trees ; and you heard the wind a very long way off rush over from the sea to the hills. There were no birds' voices ; not a foot crusht the beechmast but mine. Methought the tall trees stood round me like God. But though a man may love God he dare hardly breathe before Him ; and so was I, alone among the . watchful trees:" Neanias goes a second time, not in a dream but in reality. He comes to the Seven Sisters, who all love him and woo him more boldly than pleases his virgin modesty,—all but one, the dumb maiden Aglae, whose other name is Virgin Dawn. Her he loves at first sight and carries home to his grandfather's cot., where she wine the hearts of the old people by her humility, but arouses the jealousy of Marla, the country wench—rough but honest—who has loved Neanias from boyhood. The working out of the plot is not quite so good as the conception of it. But the motive is carried through with purity and simplicity. Neanias comes home, none the worse for his adventure as good lads and reverent are wont to do. And Aglae, after being carried off by Pan at the invocation of Merle, is recaptured, and we find her in the last scene comfortably installed in the shepherd's cottage as the wife of Neanias, with her tongue loosed from the dumbness of her maidenhood. The book may be described in a general way as charming all through. But it is good enough to challenge honest criticism ; and so it must be said that the meloOious naturalness of the first scene is not kept up in some of the scenes that follow. We first feel the falling off in the long soliloquy of Neanias after he leaves his grandfather's cottage. He immediately becomes much more introspective than he ought to be, and lapses into modes of thought and expression that would become a modern critic of the most philosophic school. However, it is but fair to add that at his worst—that is to say, when he is most 'profound and elaborate—he never quite loses his indi- viduality, which is very much the same as that of that other delightful lad of Mr. Hewlett's imagining who played the part of hero in "The Forest Lovers."
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