NOVELS.
THE QUEEN'S QUAIR.*
Mn. HEWLETT has kept a long silence, and has broken it with a story which, whether we like it or not, we must acknowledge to be the result of diligent study and conscientious workman- ship. Greatly daring, be has chosen for his subject the tragedy-Queen of modern history, and he deals especially with those years which are the most hotly debated in that debatable life. The title, in addition to its historical aptness, is truly descriptive. The Queen is the dominant figure, and it is her inner history that Mr. Hewlett has written, and through her eyes that he looks on the wild confusion of sixteenth-century Scotland. An historical novel is something more than a novel,—at any rate., when nearly all the characters are real personages and the historical sequence of events is closely adhered to. We have a right to judge it to some extent by the historical standard, for when a piece of history is familiar to the reader, the novelist who would use it must be faithful not only to the standards of his art, but to certain historical concep- tions which the reader presupposes. He cannot, for example, introduce too freakish a view of a familiar episode, unless be does it in character. Mr. Hewlett has adopted the most recent theory of the events lie describes, and he gives us a picture of the Scottish Court which is certainly not a correct one ; but he saves himself from criticism by doing it all in character. His picture is precisely what some one with Mary's upbringing might have framed,—such a one as his own Des-Essars. Murray, for instance, seems to us wholly misjudged on any possible interpretation. The suppleness of Lethington is overdone, and the timidity which Mr. Hewlett credits him with is a libel on a singularly far-seeing and resolute character. His Knox is not only a false Knox, he is not even a possible Knox, being simply a reputable and ambitions French ecclesiastic gifted with a Scotch accent. Least of all is the atmosphere of the tale a true one. But it is what Scotland and the Scottish Court may well have appeared to a French observer, and this uniform point of view gives the book a consistency of tone which no fidelity to objective truth could have achieved.
Mr. Hewlett shows a true instinct in making the tragedy of Mary's life culminate in the surrender to the Lords at Carbery Hill. Her later years and her death were the mere conse- quents of a disaster which was already accomplished. His portrait of the Queen is a most elaborate study in psychology. patiently developed by numberless little incidents and speeches ; but he has avoided the fault of over-subtlety, and Mary stands out in his pages as a living woman, the feminine counterpart of the Stuart Kings, with their charm, courage, strong passions, subtlety, and lack of all ordinary morals. A possible saint, a certain sinner, she could never be common- place, and in the difficult circumstances into which she was thrown only mediocrity could have saved her. Her impulsive Southern temperament recoiled from the grey monotony of Scottish life. She wished all men to love her, and when she found a people little amenable to her charms, she set herself to make a circle of personal adherents. It is the fate of such a nature to live in a fantastic world, and to open its eyes to the truth too late. She made a fairy prince of Darnley, and when she found him very common clay, turned upon him with the fiercest loathing. She fancied Bothwell her devoted lover, and when she had outraged all decency for his sake, found that he was in love with his wife and sought only the power she could give him. That is the tragedy of Carbery, and the culminating point of Mr. Hewlett's narrative. The numerous gaps in our knowledge of such events as the murder of Rizzio and the death of Darnley are filled in with great adroitness. There is no clumsy machinery on Mr. Hewlett's stage, and it is a triumph of his art that he has managed to make the infatuation for Bothwell and episodes like the visit of the Queen to Hermitage seem credible and natural, given the natures of the protagonists. Bothwell is, perhaps, his most successful figure,—the gross, violent, sensual man, of high physical courage, and not without a certain rough affection, but as incapable of understanding the more delicate laws of honour as he was of obeying a moral code. A:less skilful artist would have made him an ordinary brute, * The Queen's Quair ; or, The Six Years' Tragedy. By Maurice Hewlett. I London: Macmillan and Co. [Ga.]
and thereby left a hiatus in our conception of the Queen. The grim circle of Lords is almost equally good, their harsh common-sense and material ambitions contrasting finely with the diseased quixotry of Mary. The maids-of-honour are ad- mirably drawn, especially Mary Livingstone ; and Lady Both- well is a remarkable portrait of the dark, passionless, patient woman, the antithesis and rival of the Queen Mary's visit to her at Crichton is perhaps the most powerful of the many powerful scenes which Mr. Hewlett gives us, for it is a book rather of brilliant episodes than of a sustained level of drama. So also with the character-drawing : most of the characters, with the exception of the Queen, are revealed to us in a vivid flashlight rather than by a slow illumination. Take this of Knox :—
"She presently turned her head and looked cheerfully at him, her first sight of a redoubtable critic In a long head of great bones and little flesh those far-set, far-seeing, large consider- ing eyes shone like lamps in the daylight—full of power at com- mand, kept in control, content to wait. They told her nothing, yet she saw that they had a store behind. No doubt but the flame was there. If the day made it mild, in the dark it would beacon men. She saw that he had a strong nose, like a raven's beak, a fleshy mouth, the beard of a prophet, the shoulders and height of a mountaineer. In one large hand he held his black bonnet, the other was across his breast, hidden in the folds of his cloak. There was no man present of his height, save Lethington, and he looked a weed. There was no man (within her knowledge) of his patience, save the Lord James; and she knew him at heart a coward. Peering through her narrowed eyes for those few seconds, she had the fancy that this Knox was like a rugged granite cross, full of runes, wounded, weather-fretted, twisted awry. Yet her former thoughts persisted : he is very tall, he looks kind, he loves a jest—and oh ! the deep wise eyes he bath!"
The only faults we have to find with Mr. Hewlett concern his style, and his treatment in the later chapters of the love- sickness of the Queen. He is still prone to false archaisms, strained metaphors, and the painful search for the inapposite and startling word. It is a pity that a writer with so true a feeling for romance, and on occasion so delicate a sense of atmosphere, should bow the knee so often to the garish and rococo. This hot and heady euphuism is a grave blemish on work which is otherwise of remarkable quality. Nor is the author free from serious faults of taste. The later chapters are a study in disease, and such a subject can only be made acceptable by an austere and restrained treatment. Mr. Hew- lett is too apt to gloat over the pathology of love. On the analogy of the "Pilgrim's Scrip" in Richard leveret, he quotes much from a diary of the Queen's page, Des-Essars ; and this artifice, which in itself is commendable, becomes a weariness because of the false key in which the quotations are pitched. A little more austerity of style and purity of taste would have greatly increased the artistic value of Mr. Hewlett's work.
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