NOVELS.
HALFWAY HOUSE.*
BEGINNING with Mediaeval and Renaissance romance, Mr. Hewlett made a successful excursion into modernity with The Stooping Lady, and has now given us, for the first time if we are not mistaken, a story of contemporary manners. Versatility ought not to be condemned in a popular novelist, and we have never sympathised with those critics who, because an author has achieved a resounding success in one field of fiction, adjure him to eschew all others. At the same time, while readily admitting that Mr. Hewlett's literary equip- ment and his high animal spirits are bound to carry him buoyantly through any task he may venture to undertake, we confess to considerable disappointment with the quality of Halfway House. Success in a romance of the Regency epoch is, after all, no guarantee for equally prosperous results in a story in which the scene is laid in our own day. The florid side of the late Georgian epoch has much in it that would naturally appeal to a writer of Mr. Hewlett's tempera- ment. On the other hand, the bravura style, to which he so frequently resorts, is far less well attuned to an age that is at any rate unromantic in externals, while his exuberant humanism ill accords with the restraints and conventions and checks which govern a complex and highly sophisticated civilisation. Hence we find a certain incongruity between his characters—most of whom are in their essentials primitives, and even pagans—and their up-to-date surroundings. It is true that Mr. Hewlett makes heroic efforts to adapt himself to the new conditions, notably in his elaborate portrait of John Germain, a country gentleman of the type familiarised by Mr. John Galsworthy,—well groomed, well disciplined, "very solemn, rather dull, a gentleman from the bone out- wards." That such a man never existed we are not prepared to say; but there is a freakishness almost amounting to cruelty in the surprises which Mr. Hewlett has devised for the confusion of his declining years. Mr. John Germain is a man of fifty when we meet him, a well-born widower of • Halfway Heats.: a Comedy of Degrees. By Maurice Hewlett. London : Chapman and Hall. Ds.] unimpeachable respectability; who, after one digestions experience of matrimony—he was fifteen years married to a neurotic woman of fashion, who wrecked his home life, and finally broke her back in the hunting field—falls in love at first sight with a "suburban Venus," nursery governess to a retired solicitor, whom he meets at a school-treat in the grounds of his brother, a country vicar. At the first blush it looks as if Mr. Germain were going to prove a senile amorist, and illustrate in his own person the truth of the proverb that "there is no fool like an old fool ; " but Mr. Hewlett speedily reassures us on this point. Mr. Germain is an honour- able gentleman, and genuinely in love with Mary Middleham. Unfortunately, being a very stupid man and a bad judge of character, he mistakes for the incarnation of a life- long ideal a young woman of somewhat primitive instincts, whose life from seventeen to twenty-four has been a round of schoolroom drudgery, chequered with a succession of more or less serious flirtations. The situation reminds one of that of Colonel Enderby's Wife, but the handling is different. Here the disparity of temperament and upbringing—everything, in fact—is so glaring as to preclude a development on tragic lines. Mary's problem is to square her gratitude to the husband who has elevated her so immensely in the social scale with her attachment to two eligible lovers without altogether forfeiting the sympathy of her readers. Ibis a difficult piece of ethical acrobatics. Mary, on the one hand, likes and. respects Mr. Germain; on the other, she cannot dispense with admiration. The elimination of Mr. Germain is foreshadowed from the outset; but as Mr. Hewlett is not writing "little novels of Italy" or editing "Buondelmoute's saga," recourse is had to milder methods than the stiletto or the poisoned cup. Mary salves her conscience by confessing everything to her husband on his deathbed, when he is conveniently speechless though his brain is perfectly clear ; and the terms of his will reduce her to her original iudigenoe as the penalty of remarriage. There is no hypocrisy about Mary's conduct as a widow, and after a brief period of seclusion her tropical nature once more involves her in the eternal duel. This time her lovers are equally matched, both of superior station to her own, both non-moral, highly educated, fascinating young men, and sublimely indifferent to the criticism of society. When, how- ever, it is added that one is of faun-like presence, a -scholar- gipsy "who lives in a tilt-cart and mends kettles when the fancy takes him," it is not hard to forecast the upshot of his courtship.
The shadow of a puissant exemplar lies too heavily on many pages of Halfway House for it to be reckoned a really notable achievement. And for the rest, Mary, as a suburban product, is only intermittently convincing. Mr. Hewlett, to borrow Jeffreys's phrase," titillates us voluptuously." But when all is said and done, amazement at his feats of virtuosity, rather than delight or sympathy, is the dominant emotion aroused by his latest novel.
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